Journal of Research in Humanities

Exhausted Ecologies: Depleting Energy and the Capitalocene in Susanne Bier’s Serena (2014)

Komal Nazir — 2026-06-30

This article examines Susanne Bier’s Serena (2014) through the frameworks of the Capitalocene and the energy humanities to argue that the film reimagines extraction as a pervasive regime of exhaustion. Set within the timber industry of Depression-era North Carolina, Bier depicts the Smoky Mountains as a “commodity frontier” where forests, laboring bodies, reproductive capacities, and affective relations are subjected to a common logic of depletion. The article demonstrates how the film traces the circulation and exhaustion of ecological and human energies through capitalist accumulation. Rather than presenting deforestation as an isolated environmental crisis, Bier reveals extraction as a world-making process that reorganizes landscapes, labor, intimacy, and social reproduction around expendability. The film’s visual emphasis on repetitive labor, bodily injury, environmental degradation, and emotional collapse, constructs exhaustion as a shared atmospheric condition linking human and nonhuman life. Ultimately, the article argues that Bier critiques extractive capitalism by exposing the exhausted forms of life it produces, revealing that the violence of the Capitalocene resides not only in environmental devastation, but also in the gradual depletion of the material and affective conditions necessary for sustaining life.

Dialogic Wilderness in Ted Hughes’ Zoopoetics as a Conjugation between Humans and Animals

Mamoona Anwar — 2026-06-30

: This paper contends that Ted Hughes’ zoopoetics stages Bakhtinian dialogism, creating a polyphonic space through the interaction of human and animal worlds. The aim of the research is to explore the complex interplay of animal and human voices, challenging anthropocentrism and expressing the vitality of nature. The objective therein is to highlight the fluid boundaries between both the realms, establishing dynamism and dialogism in Hughes’ zoo poetry. Addressing ecocentric viewpoints, Hughes’ zoo poems establish poetry as a dialogic territory, questioning Bakhtinian logic that poetry canonizes language. The research employs a qualitative methodology, combining close reading and in-depth analysis of Hughes’ animal poems based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic paradigm. The study reveals that Hughes’ zoo poetry affirms the interdependence of man and wildlife within a shared ecological consciousness. The insights into dialogic and ecocritical frameworks in Hughes’ zoo poetry open future research avenues around reshaping human perceptions of the non-human world.

Diasporic Dissonance: Cognitive Dissonance as a Structuring Principle in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

Shafaat Yar Khan — 2026-06-30

This research studies Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire (2017) from the point of view of cognitive narratology. It highlights that Kamila Shamsie uses cognitive dissonance events to structure the plot of the novel. More than offering an explanatory textual reading, it offers a research methodology derived from the concepts of cognitive narratology, and especially the literary conceptualization of cognitive dissonance. The research contends that the terms derived from these new areas can replace classic terminologies like conflict, rising action, and denouement, or catastrophe. The methodology adopted is based on the study of textual indicators of cognitive dissonance as they are used to construct the plot. This methodology can be used for future research and serve as a paradigm or rubric for evaluative judgments.

“They Answer the Questions, When the Goal is to Ask Better Ones”: AI Dependency and the Crisis of Literary Education among Undergraduate Literature Students in Pakistan

Nisha Amir — 2026-06-30

AI dependency has significantly changed the ways students engage with academic work, especially in the discipline of literature that deeply depends upon close reading and interpretation. This study investigates to what extent literature students use AI and for what purpose, focusing on the impact of AI on critical thinking, reading habits, and creative expression. Using a mixed-method questionnaire administered to 51 undergraduate literature students from 6th and 8th semesters, the study finds that 78.4% of students use AI tools daily or several times a week, and 27.5% rely solely on AI summaries and never read original texts; they open ChatGPT before a book. Students acknowledge that AI has weakened their independent critical voice and made their writing more generic. Grounded in Paulo Freire’s banking model of education and Roland Barthes’s conception of the active reader, the study argues that AI dependency does not simply enable academic dishonesty; it systematically dismantles the intellectual and creative formation that literary education is designed to produce.