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This article examines Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000), a gothic novel that augments its postmodernist credentials by preemptively imagining and representing the theoretical gaze that would otherwise have been directed on itself. The article suggests that despite the novel's intense performance of self-reflexivity, it demonstrates a traumatic suppression of its own immediate historical conditions, particularly its temporal proximity to the events of the First Gulf War. This article thus reads the text's telling silences and its thematization of uncanny spatial violations as indexing a minimally acknowledged guilt over the war in Iraq. The novel's slippages in self-awareness not only point to an avoidance of its own scotomized history but also foreground the shifting boundaries and dispersed locations of textual self-consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The richly allusive tapestry of Carter’s fictional costumes – comprising varying fabrics, face-paint, tattoos, and other forms of bodily modifications – invites closer examination of the complex politics that undergird them. This paper examines Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman to understand how the novel uses dress not only to foreground gender-coded sartorial practices but also to draw attention to the ways in which it indexes colonial, cultural, and moral politics. The proposed paper thus, aims to analyze how Carter employs dress as a recurrent motif in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman to examine its role in signaling and shaping socio-cultural identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that this account is written at the conclusion of a year of online teaching at a private educational institute in India. Taking stock of the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic would require both distance and clarity—privileges that are possible perhaps only with the passage of time and the assurance of safety.