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Open research questions in Contemporary Literature and Criticism

39 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 3,578 Contemporary Literature and Criticism papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.

What the literature leaves open

  • ABSTRACT George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty‐Four is one of the most emblematic literary works of the 20th century; however, despite extensive political, linguistic, and psychoanalytic readings of the novel, its relational dimension—understood as a two‐way encounter between psychoanalysis and literature—remains underexplored.

    Relational Resistance and Psychic Capture: Objects, Gestures, and Intersubjectivity in Orwell's <i>Nineteen Eighty‐Four</i> · 2026 · DOI

  • ABSTRACT Despite seemingly broad acceptance within rhetorical theory, the category of the unconscious has remained understudied and misunderstood ever since Kenneth Burke first appropriated the concept from psychoanalysis, and his unquestioned commitment to conventional anthropocentric binaries continues to obscure the role and function of the unconscious within communication into this century.

    Rhetoric’s Unconscious: Freud, Burke, Lacan · 2024 · DOI

  • The readingof Sarraute should not be limited to a single anti roman attempt, but itconsiders to be approached in another aspect, psychological, since, the authortirelessly invites us to see the tropismic movements, and the indefinableactions of man by discovering the hidden meaning of his movements whichmanifest themselves in fragments of words and isolated sentences.

    Le discours de l'inconscient dans Tropismes de Sarraute : une étude stylistique sur des textes sélectionnés · 2023 · DOI

  • These aspects are the following: a) the author’s evaluation of psychoanalysis and her validation of analytic theory; b) the author’s criticism of common psychoanalytic concepts relating to trauma; c) the approach to the universal theory of transgenerational transmission of trauma; d) the inaccurate use of concepts and the weakness of the author’s arguments; e) the lack of evidence of her conclusions; f) the author’s political bias and the way she relates to her Jewish identity.

    Holocaust Studies and the Nature of Evidence: Commentary on Gomolin’s “The Intergenerational Transmission of Holocaust Trauma: A Psychoanalytic Theory Revisited” · 2019 · DOI

  • The literary context of the given study is limited to the Irish subgenre, and the two memoirs for analysis are Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), and Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People (2003).

    To the Question of Egocentric Deixis: The Opening of Childhood Memoir · 2015 · DOI

  • The name 'the Black Dahlia' is derived from a noir text, the Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake vehicle, The Blue Dahlia (1946), and although it remains unclear whether Short first received the nickname from friends while alive, or via newspaper headlines related to her murder, the connection between Short and the murky, sexually charged world represented in the noir films of the period is consolidated in the epithet.

    Postfeminist Noir: Brutality and Retro Aesthetics in The Black Dahlia · 2013 · DOI

  • " It is too soon to know if these abuses will be remembered or even judged criminal: "the great plays and novels that will open our eyes to the work accomplished by time and its great partner oblivion remain to be written" (204).

    Strange Times to be a Jew: Alternative History after 9/11 · 2011 · DOI

  • ” Duncan commendably gives these under-studied novelists their due, convincingly pointing to a paradox that riddles their works: local culture, even when recognized by these novelists as the material that flavors their fictions, inevitably fails the test of modernity—and its analogue, improvement—under whose exigencies it eventually devolves into inassimilable dirt.

    Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (review) · 2009 · DOI

  • Early Bakhtin helps us formulate a specifically modernist—by contrast with what will be called “transcendental” and “realist“—critique, a critique not limited to the field of literary analysis alone but applying to all forms of thinking that either presuppose abstract subject-object division or rely on modes of synthetic reconciliation.

    Heroic Aesthetics and Modernist Critique: Extrapolations from Bakhtin's<i>Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity</i> · 2008 · DOI

  • Although Derrida's article has been interpreted widely by legal and political scholars (see LaCapra 1990; Cornell 1993; Maley 1999; McCormick 2001; Corson 2001), the possibility for the manifestation of divine violence remains unclear.

    The Transcendent and the Postcolonial: Violence in Derrida and Fanon · 2007

  • This paper examines this understudied dimension of the police power in the phenomena of blinding those who stare back at police, including journalists and civilians.

    “Move Along, Nothing to See Here”: Police visuality, the right to look, and the right to maim · 2026 · DOI

  • The relationship between this ambivalent narrative style and the purpose of the work has generally been understudied in various analyses, or explained as a reflection of More's playful temperament.

    Basic Narrative Strategy in Utopia: “Indirect Approach” · 2025 · DOI

  • More specifically, for him, Onuf’s characterization of modernity as embodying notions of forward motion and territorial physicality is one of the main insights of his essay that could be further explored with additional theoretical analysis.

    Exchange on Nick Onuf’s ‘Metaphoricizing Modernity,’ Part III–Reconfiguration of Modernity and/as Metaphor(s) · 2024 · DOI

  • Presentation of this second research tradition is in my opinion of key importance for understanding the most important and the most serious determinants of dehumanization, although it is systematically underestimated or little known in sociological and political science literature.

    Psychologiczne uwarunkowania aktów dehumanizacji · 2020 · DOI

  • The paper aims to rectify the reception of Heidegger’s so-called “hermeneutic violence,” by addressing the under-investigated issue of its actual target and rationale.

    Hermeneutic Violence and Interpretive Conflict · 2019 · DOI

  • The specific nature of this intertext, which has not been described before, makes clear that Dark Avenues was the beginning of a shift by Bunin from modernism to postmodernism.

    The Intertext of <i>Dark Avenues</i>: How the Novella Dissolved in the Later Works of Ivan Bunin · 2019 · DOI

  • Through an interrogation of how Tate is seen as an archetypal ‘twisted dream boy’, this article makes a connection between the depiction of Tate, the spectre of Columbine that is evoked within American Horror Story: Murder House and the under-researched area of the serial killer fandom.

    ‘It’s a filthy goddamn helpless world’: Reimagining Columbine, Tate Langdon and the spectre of school shooters · 2019 · DOI

  • This book is distinguished from other studies of Dostoevskii in two ways: first, it offers an in-depth analysis of two rarely examined texts: The Adolescent and A Writer’s Diary.

    Holland, Kate The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre in the 1870s (review) · 2018 · DOI

  • Abstract Although the pervasiveness and prevalence of violence in American culture has been fairly commented upon in the last decades, the specific way American novels embrace this theme has not yet been fully explored.

    Beyond the myth of violence: Negativity, experience and identity in the early American novel · 2017 · DOI

  • Professor Hume's paper details how little we know about many aspects of dramatic history, and rightly criticizes sweeping claims based on sparse data.

    Dispensing with Power: A Response to Three Papers on Historical Criticism · 2017 · DOI

  • Whilst opening up his work to a range of under-explored areas including dissident surrealism, Anglo-Irish relations, contemporary performance practices and the writings of H.

    A Literature of Restitution: Critical Essays on W. G. Sebald · 2016 · DOI

  • While Woolf’s novel has received critical commentary that focuses on the role of vision in the narrative and critics have also noted how violence in the text supports other themes, the explicit relationship between sight and violence has not yet been fully explored.

    Vision and Violence in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves · 2015 · DOI

  • Hirsch and Spitzer write about the needs and desires that shape their own interpretation, and about how, even after digitally enlarging and scrutinizing an image that was once quite small, they were forced to acknowledge that their interpretations were inconclusive.

    The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust by Marianne Hirsch (review) · 2015 · DOI

  • As Balaev observes, speech is “identified as both the solution to the problem of traumatic pathology and a main feature that, when it is lacking, defines trauma” (9).

    The Nature of Trauma in American Novels by Michelle Balaev (review) · 2014 · DOI

  • Yet Kristeva herself has noted that ‘my investigation into abjection, violence and horror … picks up on a certain vacuum’, and other scholars have agreed that there is need for further work on what Campkin has described as an ‘under theorized’ topic.

    Abjection and Self-Identity: Towards a Revised Account of Purity and Impurity · 2013 · DOI

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39 open questions have been extracted from the limitations and future-work passages of 3,578 Contemporary Literature and Criticism papers in our library. Each one below links back to the study that raised it, so you can read the original claim in context.

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