{"title":"“Edible Aesthetics”: Blurring Boundaries between Pastry and Art","authors":"Maddalena Borsato","doi":"10.3390/h12050126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050126","url":null,"abstract":"The inquiry into whether food can be classified as “art” has long been a subject of debate. From its roots tracing back to Plato, this question has attracted the attention of both artistic movements and philosophers, especially throughout the twentieth century. In this paper, I aim to revisit this contentious issue by exploring the realm of pastry making as a form of art. Within the broader discourse on this topic, pastry emerges as a distinctive medium. Since sweets have historically transcended their mere nutritive functions, pastry may establish an immediate connection between art and food. Simultaneously, it reiterates the persistent challenges of encompassing the edible domain within conventional aesthetic theories. Throughout various contexts and periods, confectionery has evolved through the reproduction or imitation of visual arts, often reflecting the prevailing artistic climate of its flourishing periods. Moreover, due to its intimate association with rituals and celebratory occasions, pastry carries a profound cognitive and metaphorical framework that enhances its expressive potential, capturing the attention of many artists. By exploring the intersection of pastry and various artistic genres, drawing on illustrative examples ranging from modern European pièce montées to American cake design and Japanese wagashi, I critically examine the possibility and potential aesthetic qualities of this marginal genre, thereby opening up broader inquiries into the loose categorizations and fluctuations within the intricate domain of art.","PeriodicalId":93761,"journal":{"name":"Humanities (Basel, Switzerland)","volume":"27 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135461533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“The United States of Lyncherdom”: Humor and Outrage in Percival Everett’s The Trees (2021)","authors":"Michel Feith","doi":"10.3390/h12050125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050125","url":null,"abstract":"An oeuvre as redolent with the spirit of satire and humor as Percival Everett’s can be said to represent, at the same time, an anthology of humorous devices—a “humorology,” so to speak—and a self-reflexive meditation on the existential, philosophical and/or metaphysical implications of such an attitude to language and life. The Trees (2021) is a book about lynching, in which a series of gruesome murders all allude to the martyrdom of Emmett Till. Even though such subject matter seems antinomic to humor, the novel is rife with it. We propose an examination of the various guises of humor in this text, from wordplay and carnivalesque inversion to the more sinister humour noir, black or gallows humor, and an assessment of their dynamic modus operandi in relation to political satire, literary parody and the expression of the unconscious. The three axes of our analysis of the subversive strategies of the novel will be the poetics of naming, from parody to a form of sublime; the grotesque, macabre treatment of bodies; and the question of affect, the dual tonality of the novel vexingly conjugating the emotional distance and release of humor with a sense of outrage both toned down and exacerbated by ironic indirection. In keeping with the ethos of Menippean satire, humor is, therefore, both medium and message.","PeriodicalId":93761,"journal":{"name":"Humanities (Basel, Switzerland)","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135570241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Antis Loizides, Andreas Neocleous, Panagiotis Nicolaides
{"title":"Did John Stuart Mill Write ‘On Social Freedom’?","authors":"Antis Loizides, Andreas Neocleous, Panagiotis Nicolaides","doi":"10.3390/h12050123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050123","url":null,"abstract":"During his final years, John Stuart Mill reportedly attempted to update the argument of On Liberty (1859). Published posthumously in 1907, ‘On Social Freedom’ represents the initial, unrefined draft of his reworked ideas. This article argues that John Stuart Mill was not the author of ‘On Social Freedom’. First, we revisit the question of the essay’s authorship traditionally: the emphasis is on the essay’s content and the historical context of the mid-twentieth-century debate on Mill as its author. We trace the disagreement to two broad reactions to Mill’s thought. Ultimately, the question of whether the manuscript’s substantial divergence from J. S. Mill’s renowned works is enough to refute his authorship depends on one’s interpretation of Mill as a systematic philosopher. Second, we tackle this task non-traditionally: the focus shifts to the tools of computer-assisted authorship identification and the use of machine learning (ML) techniques. Once we establish some key ideas, methods, and limitations of this field of studies, we present our attempts at a computer-assisted solution to the puzzle. The results of our experiments, using ML techniques, corroborate the conclusions reached via the traditional route.","PeriodicalId":93761,"journal":{"name":"Humanities (Basel, Switzerland)","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135994445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Familiar Strangers in the Shrouded Forest: Stigma, Representation and Alzheimer’s Disease in Always","authors":"Andrew Phillip Young","doi":"10.3390/h12050121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050121","url":null,"abstract":"While literature and popular culture have sought to understand Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) in terms framed by the loss of social relationships and the strain caregivers face, this arrangement articulates AD as “being lost”, a fragmentation of temporal experience, or as irrationality punctuated by moments of self-awareness (which often operate to dehumanize those with AD). This analysis seeks, as Stefan Merrill Block puts it, to “stop looking for the lost person” in our encounter with AD. As a contemporary case study, the interactive experience Always functions as a critical intervention by not prizing moments of clarity as narrative catharsis (which literature and popular culture tend to do in the form of what is known as the “love miracle”). Instead, it serves as an important gesture toward destabilizing these practices and bridging the gap between the representation of AD and its realities. Rather than acting as a simulator of AD, Always is an abstract piece that, through design and game mechanics, opens a space for users to consider the implications of having their senses destabilized. As a result, this analysis considers how design addresses issues of social stigma, representation, storytelling and navigability.","PeriodicalId":93761,"journal":{"name":"Humanities (Basel, Switzerland)","volume":"84 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135994710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Worlds of Meaning at the Edge of Extinction: Conservation Behaviour and the Environmental Humanities","authors":"Thom van Dooren","doi":"10.3390/h12050122","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050122","url":null,"abstract":"We are living in the midst of a period of mass extinction. All around us, diverse species of animals and plants are disappearing, often largely unnoticed. However, this is also a period in which, on a daily basis, new and fascinating insights into animal life are emerging as we come to appreciate more about their remarkable perceptual, cognitive, social, and emotional lives. This article explores this strange juxtaposition of loss and knowledge-making and the many challenges and possibilities that it gives rise to. It focuses on the emerging field of Conservation Behaviour in which researchers are seeking to modify or manipulate animal behaviours to achieve conservation outcomes: for example, teaching lizards not to eat toxic prey, or birds to utilise a safer migratory route. The article seeks to bring this approach to conservation into dialogue with work in environmental humanities, including the emerging paradigm of conservation humanities. The article outlines an interdisciplinary environmental humanities approach to conservation behaviour, grounded in work in multispecies studies and philosophical ethology. It then explores four broad thematic areas—agency, identity, ethics, and loss—in which the dialogue between these two fields might prove to be particularly, and mutually, enriching.","PeriodicalId":93761,"journal":{"name":"Humanities (Basel, Switzerland)","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135994589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Israeli and Palestinian Settler Colonialism in New Media: The Case of Roots","authors":"Magdalena Pycińska","doi":"10.3390/h12050124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050124","url":null,"abstract":"Israeli settler colonialism, in time, became highly linked to the idea of a state, culminating in an institution that defends the past, present, and future practises maintaining the relations between the “native” and “settlers”. Settler colonial ideas and practises sustaining binary opposition between the “native” and the “settler” are reproduced not only by Israeli state broadcasters, but also by settler colonial social media. This article proposes media analysis that goes beyond the usual national and conflict narrative and links “settler colonial common sense” with social media impacts and state ideas/sovereign ideas of property that strive to eliminate native people or transfer them outside Israel’s perceived land ownership and sovereignty. This article also shows how Israeli settler colonial politics and narratives are supported by other settler colonial states (especially the United States). New media and settler common sense cannot be disassociated from the Israeli state and global politics, even though some settlers may have their own strategies regarding the relations with native Palestinians. The State of Israel, through massive surveillance technologies and support from other states that view militarisation and population management as crucial to maintaining its power, holds a great deal of influence over how it frames the “conflict” with Palestinians. We witness how both state violence and institutionalised Jewish privilege are recreated on the ground and globally through the new media. This issue is analysed through the “Roots” (a grassroots movement for understanding among Israelis and Palestinians) case study.","PeriodicalId":93761,"journal":{"name":"Humanities (Basel, Switzerland)","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136038389","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Vagina, the Ear, and the Eye: Bodily Orifices and Sight in Miguel de Cervantes’s “El Celoso Extremeño”","authors":"Silvia Arroyo","doi":"10.3390/h12050119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050119","url":null,"abstract":"The complex mythological web of Miguel de Cervantes’s novella “El celoso extremeño” has been extensively explored by scholars. However, despite the fact that most conducting myths referenced in the novel revolve around themes of vigilance, clandestine gaze, and visual deceit, these topics have not been systematically addressed yet. This present essay intends to bridge this analytical gap by exploring the ways in which mythological parables in “El celoso extremeño” connect with contemporary scientific preoccupations regarding perception, optical illusions, the nature of images and sounds and the ways the human eye and ear perceive them.","PeriodicalId":93761,"journal":{"name":"Humanities (Basel, Switzerland)","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136114478","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Body Horror in Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark","authors":"Maria Holmgren Troy","doi":"10.3390/h12050120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050120","url":null,"abstract":"African American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s works have attracted a great deal of academic interest since the 1990s onwards. Clay’s Ark (1984), however, has not gained as much scholarly attention as some of her other novels, and the centrality of Gothic aspects, in particular those related to body horror, has not been addressed. By focusing on how these aspects inform the structure, setting, and characters’ actions and relationships in this novel about an extraterrestrial infection that threatens and changes humanity, this article demonstrates how Butler employs and adapts strategies and conventions of Gothic horror and body horror in order to explore various attitudes towards difference and transformation, paralleling these with a particular brand of antiblack racism growing out of American slavery. Although the 1980s are already receding into American history, and a few aspects of the imagined twenty-first century in this novel may feel dated today (while many are uncomfortably close to home), Clay’s Ark is a prime example of how aspects of popular culture genres and media—such as science fiction, the Gothic, and horror films—can be employed in an American novel to worry, question, and destabilize ingrained historical and cultural patterns.","PeriodicalId":93761,"journal":{"name":"Humanities (Basel, Switzerland)","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136115152","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Modern Anxieties and Traditional Influence in Horror Anime","authors":"Anik Sarkar","doi":"10.3390/h12050118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050118","url":null,"abstract":"Japan has a longstanding tradition of horror narratives that feature a variety of macabre embodiments. They draw upon ancient folklore, thereby providing a unique perspective on spirits specific to Japanese culture. The influence of these countless supernatural beings from Japanese mythology and folklore has molded many incarnations seen in popular culture, which have been commonly deemed “strange” and “weird”. This study seeks to demystify the ambiguity and “strangeness” surrounding three Japanese anime series, Another, Yamishibai, and Mononoke. It attempts to analyze how each of these anime employs folklore and traditional art-styles to portray a modern society plagued with sociocultural complications.","PeriodicalId":93761,"journal":{"name":"Humanities (Basel, Switzerland)","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135858774","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Re-Evaluation of the Grievance Studies Affair","authors":"Geoff G. Cole","doi":"10.3390/h12050116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050116","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":93761,"journal":{"name":"Humanities (Basel, Switzerland)","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136012566","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}