Mohammad Bagher Shabanpour

Ian McEwan’s Solar has been the subject of many a debate, mostly due to its controversial representation of climate change’s cause and the solution offered for the global disaster. The paper explores the novel’s judgment over climate change’s fountainhead and the protagonist’s vain project to save the earth. The scope of the study encompasses the narrator’s accounts of the characters and events in the story. In the light of David Harvey’s notion of ‘spatial fix,’ the study, through a close reading of the novel, focuses on the context within which the story unfolds in order to elaborate on the transformation of the earth into a globalized monolithic built environment called ‘the planet’ for the sake of efficiency and free flow of capital and commodities. It also argues that the protagonist’s solar energy generation project is a neo-liberal initiative to replace a less lucrative production mode and tackle the system’s critical spell of overaccumulation, rather than global warming.

This paper establishes Twitter literature as a distinct born-literature literary genre shaped by the dialectical nature of cyberspace and its constraints and affordances, including enforced brevity, threading modularity, and algorithmic virality. It addresses the critical gap in studies on electronic literature and digital humanities, traditionally pivoted on studies of hypertext fiction, while pushing the literary potentials of microblogging to the margin. Synthesizing Hayles’s media-specific analysis, Levine’s genre theory, and other ideas on the dynamics of cyberspace, it argues that the constraints of Twitter do not overshadow creative forms of cultural critiques, but, on the contrary, they radically democratize the production of literature through a highly social space of engagement and participation. Through a genealogical analysis, the literary possibilities behind Twitter literature and its evolution are traced to pre-digital fragments, digital precursors, and key movements on Twitter. Analyses of two examples, including Jennifer Egan's Black Box and Teju Cole’s Small Fates, demonstrate how constraints foster aphoristic density, nonlinear narratives, and participatory meaning-making. The study suggests that although Twitter democratizes authorship and facilitates decolonial agencies and critiques, its algorithmic virality replicates hierarchies through mechanisms like visibility biases. The paper promotes digital humanities by redefining twenty-first-century literariness and placing cyberspace as a potential zone for genre formation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are usually considered neutral technological advancements. However, critical digital studies increasingly emphasize the need to challenge their potential to perpetuate colonial power structures in cyberspace. This paper argues that LLMs function as powerful apparatuses of digital neocolonialism. It aims to diagnose this phenomenon within the field of literary AI and to propose a decolonial framework for its future development. This study demonstrates how the protocols of extracting and processing data privilege Western epistemologies in a systematic manner. Then, it develops a conceptual framework for the praxis of decolonial AI based on the principles of reciprocity and epistemic justice. The analysis reveals that the extractivist data collection utilized by dominant LLMs treats cultural and linguistic data as territory for appropriation, privileging the Western literary canon and erasing marginalized languages and traditions. This has led to linguistic homogenization and epistemic injustice as well as the imposition of aesthetic standards of the global West. In response, the proposed decolonial framework has necessitated a paradigm shift from extraction to reciprocity, which involves community-led data governance. Furthermore, AI should be used as a collaborative, co-creative tool by literary writers and researchers. As a further decolonial step, Eurocentric evaluative criteria in this field must be reformed in concrete ways. The decolonial approach advanced in this paper seeks to fundamentally reposition literary AI. The ultimate goal of this repositioning is to foster a pluriversal aesthetic and epistemic framework.

Geography has received great attention since the 19th century. Kant established it as a discipline which resulted in the development of geographical equipment. Consequently, surveying projects were launched in England. This paper argues that Friel’s Translations depicts the extinction of the Irish culture, done by the Army’s implementation of Ireland Ordnance Survey in 1830, in which Irish/Gaelic toponyms, carrying a great volume of a people’s History/Archaeology, were anglicised. The English Empire strengthened its domination over Ireland through creating new maps of the Northern territories. The paper does a Foucauldian reading of geography, as a contemporary knowledge, which aided the reconstitution of the British power to hamper the contemporary revolutions or invasions. It maintains that Translations is a play on space and History/Archaeology, in which the role of space outweighs that of time, so does the production of a new space and the extinction of old spaces through Ordnance Survey.