In setting his 1898 tale In the Cage in a telegraph office, Henry James was adapting and investigating a metaphor that earlier novelists had used for the workings of fiction. As invoked by writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, the idealized image of the electric telegraph hints at some of the formal and ideological properties of…[Read more]

The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organizations, from art history to zoology. But does “excellence” actually mean anything? Does this pervasive narrative of “excellence” do any good? Drawing on a range of sources we…[Read more]

In the past, Palestinian cinema was dominated by a nationalist discourse revolving around refugee ideology, resulting from the trauma of the lost homeland. As the past is generally static, revisiting it became an exercise in nostalgia. The last decade, however, has seen the emergence of a number of transnational Palestinian films telling stories…[Read more]

This course explores major currents of political radicalism both within and outside of the dominant western political tradition. Topics considered may include antidemocratic radicalism, democratic radicalism, Marxian radicalism, radical feminism, radical individualism, and post-colonial radicalism. Readings will include selections from Kant,…[Read more]

Selected works from the literatures of former European colonies: African, Indian, Caribbean, Australian, Canadian, Latin American, etc.

This course explores major currents of political radicalism both within and outside of the dominant western political tradition. Topics considered may include antidemocratic radicalism, democratic radicalism, Marxian radicalism, radical feminism, radical individualism, and post-colonial radicalism. Readings will include selections from Kant,…[Read more]

Theories of the public sphere and of imagined political communities of shared reading have had lasting effects on the theoretical conceptualization of Americanist book history, but they also largely overlook the materiality of texts in ways that early and nineteenth-century American readers and writers did not. This essay reads early and…[Read more]

In this paper, I show how, as a philologist, William Strunk’s approach to language was a rich historical and rhetorical experience far from the prescriptivism E.B. White ascribes to him in the first edition of The Elements of Style (1959). An interesting historical parallel exists between Strunk’s tenure as a PhD student in philology at Cornell…[Read more]