Editors’ Notes and <italic>Introductions to Landscapes of Diversity in North America</italic> and <italic>Affect</italic>, <italic>Immersion, and Games</italic>

James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Politics of Early Twentieth-Century Ireland Remarks by Ronan Gargan, Ambassador of Ireland to Hungary

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This paper offers a historical context and analysis on an under-studied First Nations located within the Huron–Robinson Treaty area of Northeastern Ontario—Atikameksheng Anishnawbek [White Fish Lake First Nations], whose relatively small population dealt with a great many challenges as settler society arrival created pressures on livelihoods, spirituality, physical well-being, lifestyles, and much more. Detailed micro-study of the Whitefish Lake Roman Catholic Day School operations from 1880 to the 1930s reveals a continuing tale of the Band’s efforts at obtaining Indigenous-led education for its children, as well as the often indifferent, sometimes hostile, and at best incompetent role played by Indian Affairs. Often a tale of struggle rather than success, it nevertheless sheds light on First Nations’ determination to provide their children with effective education emerging from Indigenous traditions. (PVK)
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Seeking Education on Their Terms: The Atikameksheng Anishnawbek [White Fish Lake First Nations] 1880–1930

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The phrase “son/s of the forest,” in relation to distinctive trees, was widely used in British periodicals throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When the phrase began to appear in US periodicals in the early nineteenth century, however, a shift occurred as writers started applying “of the forest” specifically to Native Americans. This essay examines how the phrase is used with increasing frequency in American literature, mission reports, and government documents during the decades leading up to the 1830 Indian Removal Act. I argue that print culture was used to reimagine Indigenous Americans as commodities, such as trees, to justify their removal from the landscape. The article is framed by an examination of how William Apess used his works, namely <italic>A Son of the Forest</italic>, to resist the State-sponsored violence of Jacksonian policies and Indian Removals. (JU)
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The Forest “Appeared Alive with its Sons and Daughters”: Commodification of the Indian Body in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

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This essay explores race, racism, history, and popular memory from the vantage point of the Indigenous world, and, specifically, Native peoples colonized within the present-day United States. Over the course of the past decade, Indigenous movements for land and life have shed light on the incomplete nature of conquest in Native North America and the instability of settler colonialism. “Unreconciled” explores the ongoing tension between Indigenous presence and the settler colonial “logic of elimination” in the context of land acknowledgments, commemoration, popular culture, and federal policy. We show that, despite changes with regard to the ways in which non-Indigenous people in settler states collectively remember or imagine community, elements of settler memory continue to reside within and limit public conversations on race, remembrance, reconciliation, and reparation. (DMC and MLC)
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Unreconciled: Indigenous Presents/Presence &amp; Settler Memory

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This essay tells the story of the nine-year transformation of Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, USA (2005–2014) from a memory desert to the site of the single greatest concentration of Emmett Till memorials anywhere in the world. As I do so, I stress the influence of topography and, above all, the north-to-south path of the Tallahatchie River through the heart of the county. I argue that the hills, rivers, floods, and soils of the county are the very mechanisms through which race, politics, and commemoration mingled and, by mingling, produced the commemorative landscape as we know it. The river and the soils around it were the transfer point through which questions of race came to influence commemoration and by which practices of commemoration evolved in ways that served the racial interests of the planter class. (DT)
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Of Race and Rivers

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The narrative-adventure game, <italic>Where the Water Tastes Like Wine </italic>(2018) is “a bleak American folk tale about traveling, sharing stories, and surviving manifest destiny,” whose objective is to introduce the player to voices formerly overshadowed or muted by the mainstream myth of the American dream. Players are tasked to find “the greatest stories,” that is “the ones people will tell you about their own lives,” meeting marginalized characters, like the migrant Mexican worker or the Navajo woman, as well as well-known figures of resistance, like Beat author Neal Cassady.
Relying on Aubrey Anable’s definition of video games as affective systems, the article demonstrates that the player’s non-linear, rhizomic wandering results in a more accurate, affective cartography of the USA and provides the opportunity to tap into the experience of becoming posthuman via a marginalized avatar. <italic>Where the Water Tastes Like Wine </italic>thus aligns with the objectives of Rosi Braidotti’s critical posthumanism: it facilitates a different, more democratic future achieved by actualizing as political subjects of knowledge the “missing people,” who did not qualify as fully human according to the humanist idea of “man.” (IB)
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A Quest for the “Missing People”: Posthuman Affect in Where the Water Tastes Like Wine

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

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

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The essay deals with a powerful feature of games, the phenomenon of in-game rule change or, more specifically, the occasional, even if regulated, breach of contract between the game and the player, which has a dramatic effect on the player’s experience. I attempt to define this phenomenon through the concepts of operational rules, meaningful play, board state and victory points, and then review our perceptions and preconceptions of board games, which are seen in most cases as a balanced means of social puzzle solving. The examples discussed demonstrate that some modern games are far more interactive, dynamic, and less balanced than we might imagine, which makes rule changes during play possible and dramatic. (GZK)
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Changing Rules While Playing: On the Affective Potential of In-Game Rule Changes

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Challenged by the artistic excellence and popular success of his early work, <italic>A Huguenot, on St Bartholomew’s Day, Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge</italic>, the Pre-Raphaelite painter, John Everett Millais turned to the same theme once more. <italic>Mercy: St Bartholomew’s Day, 1572</italic>, however, failed to meet expectations. The essay attempts to reveal certain reasons for the vast difference in the reception of the two pictures and offers a close study of the scenes and characters depicted in them as well as of the social, religious, and cultural contexts of the historical periods the pictures were produced in. (ÉP)
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John Everett Millais’s Huguenot Pictures

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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)
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The Stalinist Soviet Union in the Disney Animated Cartoon Tale Spin

Reviews: Utopianism vs Consumerism

Reviews: Russia and America: Remembering Bondage Together

Reviews: A Good Guide to America’s Unique Art Form

Reviews: Shakespeare, She Wrote

Volume 30 (2024): Issue 1 (May 2024)

Volume 29 (2023): Issue 2 (November 2023)

Volume 29 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023)

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 reviews in English and American Studies (including Canadian, Australian, Irish, South African, and Caribbean topics) on such varied fields as literature, theater, visual culture, film, music, art, culture, philosophy, history, religion, and theory. We are open to all theoretical approaches and methodologies, provided that they engage with the chosen topic at the required depth and promise to advance its critical elaboration. The language of the journal is English. Manuscripts are welcome and are subject to rigorous peer review: the contribution is first reviewed by the editors; if judged to be potentially publishable, the contribution is sent for blind review by two authoritative referees; once the contribution has been tentatively accepted, the HJEAS editors work with the author to prepare it for publication. All submissions should conform to the 7th edition of the MLA Handbook in all matters of style and use the MLA parenthetical method of citation keyed to a works-cited list. Contributions to history may alternatively employ the latest edition of the Chicago Manual of Style.  Any contribution accepted for publication by HJEAS is done so with the understanding and under the author’s warranty that it has not been previously published in English in any form, and that it will not be published elsewhere until after it has been published by HJEAS, unless an agreement has been specifically entered into for a joint publication with HJEAS; that the author will be financially responsible for any legal action taken against HJEAS by cause of the author’s contribution; that HJEAS retains the right to republish the contribution in any issue or reissue of HJEAS in any form, including the HJEAS website, and to reprint it in any anthology sponsored by HJEAS; and that in any subsequent republication of the contribution, the author will acknowledge its first publication in HJEAS.  HJEAS is published twice a year (once in the summer and once in the winter). Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 