Structures and Choices

The 2026 issue of Philologia was not assembled around a theme, but the nine essays collected here share a recurring concern: how individuals recognize and respond to the systems that condition their choices, whether chivalric, generic, architectural, legal, economic, institutional, or cognitive. These essays do not converge on a shared answer; however, each takes seriously the conditions under which a choice becomes legible as a choice at all, and they speak to one another more than their disciplinary range first suggests. We are pleased to introduce them briefly here.

Andreea Farr’s “Rendering Literature: Architectural Interpretations in Film Adaptations” turns to five film adaptations—Brokeback Mountain, The Virgin Suicides, BlacKkKlansman, Fight Club, and American Psycho—to show how built environments function as silent narrators of gender, power, and isolation.

Ava Nguyen’s “The Hookup Trade-Off” examines hookup culture among young adults through neuroscience, sociology, and public health, arguing that the apparent freedom of casual encounters trades against the human need for intimacy in ways participants often recognize only afterward.

Cate Langhorn, in “How the Symbolism of Color Illustrates Honor in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” reads the poem’s use of green, red, and gold as a sustained argument that honor is not the exclusive property of chivalric code but lives equally in the wildness the Green Knight. represents.

Erin Kearns’s “Subverting ‘the Fiend Intemperance’: Poe’s Critique of Temperance Discourse in ‘The Black Cat’” makes the case that Poe’s most disturbing story is not a piece of temperance literature but a satire of it, indicting the very framework that would let its narrator off the hook.

Hannah Banks’s “Judicial Responses to the Great Recession” examines how the American judiciary responded—or failed to respond—to the economic crisis of 2008, asking what it reveals when a legal system’s responses to systemic failure are themselves shaped by the structures that produced it.

Isabella Joerg’s “An Evolution of Revenge: Complicating the Classical Tradition” traces how the figure of vengeance moves across classical sources and the texts that inherit them, complicating the moral arithmetic that revenge narratives are often assumed to perform.

Jenna Mason’s “The Role of Intuition in Moral and Ethical Decision Making” draws on contemporary moral psychology to argue that intuition is neither a reliable guide nor something we can think our way out of, and that any honest account of ethical life must reckon with both.

Julia Vecharello’s “The Privilege of Doubt” is an autoethnographic essay that interrogates the author’s position as a beneficiary of inherited wealth who nonetheless advocates for economic equality, arguing that privilege is not a reason for silence but an obligation toward action.

Sarah Van Glanden’s “Educational Institutions and the White Public Space” shows how American educational institutions function as racialized spaces, arguing the apparent neutrality of the classroom, curriculum, and campus is a structural feature rather than an absence of structure.

We think these essays demonstrate the wide range of work undergraduate students are doing at Virginia Tech in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, across English studies, sociology, political science, philosophy, and more. We want to thank our undergraduate contributors and the faculty whose support made their research possible.

—The Editors