<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Horror video games create an enhanced sense of fear compared to film and television of the same genre due to their use of ludic elements. These ludic elements, specifically haptic game design mechanics, play conditioning, and the coding of the games themselves all bypass the screen and controller to impact the body of the player. Understanding affect as the relationship of the body to the world, video games are therefore a strong affective medium for the horror genre.
Three aspects enable video games to have this strong impact: haptic game design mechanics, play conditioning, and game coding. Using the controller as a threshold object, video games physically interact with players to create a horror experience that compels the body to mirror the fear on screen. Additionally, horror games condition players to play them in a specific way to heighten tension and deny control. Finally, the coding of horror games can create obstacles that deny player control and create an environment of fear.
The aim of the essay is to explore the effective use of all these elements and mechanics in three games: the 2015 game <italic>Until Dawn</italic>, the 2016 horror game <italic>Amnesia: The Dark Descent</italic>, and the 2014 game <italic>Alien: Isolation</italic>. (VH)
</abstract>

The Ludic Impact of Horror Games on the Body: <italic>Until Dawn, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, </italic>and <italic>Alien: Isolation</italic>

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
From 2017 on, the #MeToo movement has resulted in a set of new perspectives and narratives in cinema; narratives, which, so far, have only ever been presented from and for the point of view of the male gaze. A special case in this process is Emerald Fennel’s 2020 directorial debut, <italic>Promising Young Woman.</italic> This essay argues that the film not only capitalizes on rape-revenge genre clichés, but it also relies on the tropes of romantic comedy traditions to give a sharp critique of the cultural climate that tolerates, denies, and normalizes rape. The subversion of the male gaze, the centrality of morality in revenge, and the avoidance of the spectacle of female suffering align <italic>Promising Young Woman</italic> with the rape-revenge genre. At the same time, the film’s take on the Hollywood myth of the likeable and harmless “good guy” highlights the role of classical romantic comedy conventions in perpetuating rape culture. (ZSOR)
</abstract>

Film Genres after #MeToo: <italic>Promising Young Woman</italic> as a Rape-Revenge Film and a Rom-Com

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This article argues that the 2D side-scrolling adventure platformer video game <italic>Celeste </italic>(2018) mobilizes the tradition of ruin-gazing to provide a metaphor for selfexploration and then crucially transforms the psychoanalytic “cure” into a gamified experience. Video games that contain ruins inherit the tradition of “ruin-gazing” from the eighteenth century and expand on the affective experiences ruins produce through immersion and play. Ruins disabuse players of the notion of stability or safety, and assert the significance of player actions in spaces that, when ruined, become culturally, socially, or psychologically destabilized. Thus, they are readable spaces that strategically engage the player, and the ludic actions taken by players constitute the act of reading the game as text. This article analyzes the ruined spaces of <italic>Celeste </italic>and how the actions available to players within those ruined spaces reinforce the game’s narrative themes of self-healing. It also aims to demonstrate how the ruins that Madeline (the player avatar) navigates are a representation of her fractured psyche, mind, and identity. The player’s success is dependent on their capacity to navigate Madeline’s (literally) ruined sense of self, which through their ludic subject-position and entanglement with Madeline, invites the player to participate in and experience Madeline’s emotional and mental catharsis. (RC)
</abstract>

Immersion Through Ruins: Entanglement, Pleasure, and Struggle in Celeste

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This essay examines the role of waste as a categorizing mechanism in the formation of storyworlds in two of the short stories featured in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s <italic>Friday Black</italic> (2018), “The Era” and “Through the Flash.” These two stories “waste” is a category defined according to the internal rules that govern their respective storyworlds, and in this case it arguably takes inspiration from preexisting classifications that have shaped, and continue to shape, the Black experience in the US under (late) capitalism. Analyzing how the relation between emotions, interpersonal bonding, and waste is constructed in each story, the essay demonstrates that understanding the power of waste as a classifying device helps shed light on mechanisms of oppression, which could contribute to dismantling the resulting classifications as well. (SVF)
</abstract>

“Even the apocalypse isn’t the end”: Emotional Numbness and the Reconstruction of Interpersonal Bonding in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s <italic>Friday Black</italic>

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The Disney animated cartoon television series <italic>TaleSpin </italic>was released in 1990, at the end of a decade that started with an escalation of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, and ended in the abolition of nuclear weapons, which foreshadowed the eventual downfall of the USSR in 1991. This “adventure-plus comedy” American series successfully combines sources not only from within the studio (the 1967 Disney animated version of <italic>The Jungle Book</italic>), but also from adventure films outside the studio (<italic>Casablanca</italic>, Indiana Jones movies), and most interestingly, it weaves in a harsh parody of Stalinist Soviet Union. <italic>TaleSpin </italic>effectively captures the complex political climate of the 1980s–1990s by presenting the conditions of high Stalinism (mass repressions, executions, and show trials) in the military state Thembria with her Thembrian inhabitants, the anthropomorphic warthogs. The essay explores the characteristic topoi of Stalin’s Soviet Union in the series with an overview of US–Soviet relationship and the general perception of the USSR in the United States in the 1980s. The essay argues that the American image of the USSR established in the 1930s–1950s was extrapolated to post-Stalinist periods of Soviet history and was still prevalent in the 1980s, thus shaping the conception of Thembria and the Thembrians. (ÁLK)
</abstract>

The Stalinist Soviet Union in the Disney Animated Cartoon Tale Spin

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This essay explores the outlines of the “quarantine subject,” a construct that has formed along the borderlines of viral, immunological, psychopolitical, and biopolitical metaphors. The focus is grounded in media archeology and media anthropology. Under media anthropology lies a basically German philosophical anthropological tradition that explores the convergence of biological and cultural dimensions. Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen have only recently been rediscovered in the English-speaking world.1 Hans Belting, for one, has elaborated a triple image anthropology that uses the triad of picture–medium–body in the interpretation of various aesthetic paradigms. This essay maps the convergence between the three dimensions emphasized by Belting and the digital-virtual turn driven by, among other factors, the COVID–19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns. The goal is the elaboration of a speculative “quarantine subjectivity model,” one that is determined by geographical and social factors, such as Internet access and technological integration, as well as a relatively “moderate” degree of quarantine measures. (MZN)
</abstract>

Going Viral: The Media Anthropology of the “Quarantine Subject” in the Context of Biopolitics and Psychopolitics

Reviews: Visiting the Louvre

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This essay seeks to revisit the curious case of the “Asiatic Black Man” by demonstrating how this identity, inherent in the collective unconsciousness and shared by Muhammad Ali, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson, could be consolidated as an “imagined community” through the microhistory of African Americans experiencing Soviet Asia. The essay proposes Afro-American Eurasianism as a transcontinental approach to converge the transnational, transatlantic, and transpacific perspectives in the Eurasian landmass, wherein the consilience of the Soviet overarching ambition of becoming the only world power as well as various themes that connected the micro-narrative of African Americans with the big history1 of Asia rendered Eurasianism as a shared political ideology, to be exploited by each side as a grand strategy in ending global racial politics. By positioning the twin cases of Du Bois and Hughes, this paper aims to show how the Soviet Union’s divergent endeavors of the “world revolution”—with Hungary and China as their primary targets for exporting revolutions in order to control the Eurasian “heartland”—and “socialism in one country”—with Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan as the in-the-making products of the Soviet nation-building experiments so as to convey the raceless image of Potemkin villages through Central Asia’s window to the world—could draw them away from their initial embrace of Black nationalism and shape their radical thoughts toward the Soviet cause. Moreover, this study posits that Soviet Asia functioned as a psychogeographical and geopolitical conduit that facilitated the elaboration of the Afro-American “Asiatic Black Man” fantasy and imagination of the communistic utopia as an alternative international order, while it unexpectedly resulted in a new “double-consciousness,” compelling Du Bois and Hughes to oscillate between Moscow and Beijing/Tashkent. (YZ)
</abstract>

“Asiatic Black Man”: W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes in Soviet Asia--Part I—The Shifting “Double-consciousness” of Du Bois

Reviews: Acknowledging Shakespeare’s Others as Ours

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The essay reads <italic>Winter</italic> (2017), the second volume of Ali Smith’s “Seasonal Quartet,” as a novel that engages with Brexit by revitalizing the metaphor of the body politic. Focusing on the role of landscape, the novel’s use of art objects and its intertextual conversation with Shakespeare’s late romance <italic>Cymbeline</italic> (ca. 1610), the essay also addresses the ways in which the reimagining of the body politic is entangled with Smith’s poetic strategies, arguing that matters of form and aesthetics are indistinguishable from the novel’s ethical and political concerns. Exploring parallels with post-’45 British landscape painting and art, especially Barbara Hepworth’s works, the analysis is concerned with two striking intrusions of the irrational in the novel: a hallucinated lump of landscape hovering above the characters and a child’s head floating in the air; both are crucial to the revitalization of the metaphor of the body politic as well as in the conversation the novel conducts with British art and with <italic>Cymbeline</italic>, a play that is an exploration of the idea of the body politic and of sovereignty in the context of the end of Britain’s relations with Europe. (TB)
</abstract>

Figures and Grounds: Art and the Body Politic in Ali Smith’s <italic>Winter</italic>

Reviews: Fantasies of Unveiling Flesh and Freedom: Post-9/11 Desires for Truth and Security

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This essay looks at some of the American film noir that focus on traumatized veterans in the post-World War II era, up to the twenty-first century and argues that noir thrillers centering on mentally disturbed veterans of World War II allow for both commemoration and criticism of the global interventionism that American exceptionalism legitimized during the Cold War and the Wars on Terror. Paradigmatic noirs construct traumatized veterans to investigate their symptoms of amnesia and paranoia as responses to historical interventions. While the analysis of Fred Zinnemann’s <italic>Act of Violence</italic> (1948) challenges idolizations of members of the Greatest Generation as morally superior immediately after their return home, that of Alan Parker’s <italic>Angel Heart</italic> (1987) probes into how the projection of a Faustian tale upon amnesia connects a post-World War II identity conflict to an anti-communist climate ripe with social tensions. The third veteran noir, the post-9/11 film <italic>Shutter Island</italic> (2010) by Martin Scorsese, conclusively reveals how two paranoid narratives overlap in the films under scrutiny, aiming to deconstruct the patriotic trope of American heroism in their subtexts. (AG)
</abstract>

American Veteran Noirs: Investigating Exceptionalism and Its Post-World War II Trauma

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The unfolding ecological crisis is often blamed on an excerpt from the bible, according to which humans should “[b]e fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen 1:28). This command is repeatedly contrasted with another, saying that “[t]he LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it” (Gen 2:15). Could the current climate change have been avoided if the “second” command had carried more weight? Darren Aronofsky directed two films that deal with this question. In <italic>Noah</italic> (2014), it is the “second,” “eco-friendly” command that seems to reflect the intent of God; therefore, the secular techno-capitalist development of humankind, which is leading to an ecological disaster, is a revolt against this command and a manifestation of the Fall. As opposed to this, <italic>mother</italic>!, made three years later, suggests that it is the intertwining of the Christian tradition with patriarchy and anthropocentrism that lies behind the destruction of the environment, which in turn implies that the disaster can actually be interpreted as an adherence to the “first” command. (AH)
</abstract>

Aronofsky’s Two Visions of the Ecological Fall

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Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies

The Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) seeks to publish the best of Hungarian and international scholarship and invites articles, interviews, review essays, and...

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The Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) seeks to publish the best of Hungarian and international scholarship and invites...