This article demonstrates that Sadegh Hedayat's The Blind Owl (Buf-e Kur), arguably the most important work of modern Iranian literature but also seen as ‘a Western novel’, makes it conspicuous how our understanding of ‘global’ texts is conditioned by translation, critical reception, and the material aspects of publication. More precisely, the article examines how Western and non-Western critical approaches to this novel combine to produce illuminating, but also problematic, polysemies. It shows how specific lexical choices in Roger Lescot's French and D. P. Costello's English translations transform the work's meaning, and considers, more broadly, the critical, definitional, and theoretical questions about the politics of hermeneutics and translation which these choices imply. Its wider subject is the reading, translating, and teaching of non-Western literature.

Anthropomorphic nonhuman animals figure prominently in children’s literature, teaching young readers relevant life lessons and adding variety, humor, and emotional distance to safely consider otherwise traumatizing ideas. Despite its educational and developmental value, however, using animal characters to tell human stories normalizes the very same mechanisms that adult humans use to subjugate real animals. Bringing animal-studies insights to bear on children’s literature and development, this article critiques the use of anthropomorphism in children’s books and urges that, short of the unrealistic demand to abandon the animal as metaphor, young readers and their adult mentors reread children’s books critically and discuss ways of making animals matter. The article examines the debate about anthropomorphism in science and its application to childhood development. It then turns to the pros and cons of anthropomorphizing animals in children’s books and discusses specific examples of books featuring anthropomorphic animal characters.

Following the recent "animal turn" in literary studies, which has inspired scholars to revisit traditional human-centered interpretations of texts narrated by animals, this article focuses on the convergence of animal studies and trauma theory. It offers new animal-centered close readings of Tolstoy's Strider and Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog, paying attention to animal pain rather than seeing it, and the text as a whole, as an allegory of human society. Like many other authors of literary fiction featuring animal narrators, Tolstoy and Bulgakov employ a kind of empathic ventriloquism to narrate animal pain, an important project which, however, given the status of both the animal and trauma outside human language, and thus susceptible to being distorted by it, produces inauthentic discourse (animal-like, rather than animal narration); therefore, these authors get closest to animal pain, not through sophisticated narration, but through the use of ellipses and onomatopoeia. Ultimately, any narratological difficulty with animal focalization is minor compared to the ethical imperative of anti-speciesist animal-standpoint criticism, and the goal is to reconceive the status of animals in literature so as to change their ontological place in the world, urging that this critical work and animal rights advocacy be continued in the classroom.

This paper provides a critical analysis of literary disability in Mikhail Lermontov's "Taman'," the most famous story in his semiautobiographical novel, A Hero of Our Time (1838-40). It focuses on three disabled characters: the blind boy, the deaf old woman proprietor, and the mad young woman. These characters have traditionally been treated as projections of the hero-narrator's imagination, as part of the story's Gothic aspects, or as metaphors meant to reveal something about him, thus reducing disability to a textual device. Even when central to the interpretation, disability tends to be read by Lermontov critics as figurative or counterfeit. This project aims, therefore, to reclaim the characters whose disabilities are undermined by the critical tradition. Through a contextualized close reading, it considers how these characters and the narrative events in which they are entangled shape—and ultimately unmake—Pechorin, the eponymous "hero of our time," whose perceptions of dis/ability are challenged by the events of the story he recounts. The paper finds that the depiction of disability in "Taman'" confirms some aspects of our limited historical knowledge about disability (invalidnost') in nineteenth-century Russia and tells us something about conceptions of Romantic literary disability more broadly.