Bound by market pressures, twenty-first century academia finds itself fettered by the demands of “student success” that a capitalist knowledge economy places on its participants. Humanities scholars are, as Jonathan Dollimore noted in his 2014 SAA address, pressed with their back against the wall, “in a marketplace pretty indifferent to what…[Read more]

In his fiction, journalism and letters, Dostoevsky recurrently mentions ethnicity of his protagonists. Russians, Poles, Englishmen, Germans, Turks, Greeks etc. never act as individuals with their personal life but rather as ‘carriers’ of some national idea. Amidst the nations represented in Dostoevsky’s oeuvre, there are some Jews. The fashi…[Read more]

Syllabus, project assignments, and milestones for HON 313, “Reading Machines” (Fall 2017), a first-year interdisciplinary experience course at NC State University. Reading Machines invites students into a historically ranging, critically intensive, and hands-on learning environment about the technologies by which humans transmit ideas. The course…[Read more]

Syllabus, project assignments, and milestones for HON 313, “Reading Machines” (Fall 2017), a first-year interdisciplinary experience course at NC State University. Reading Machines invites students into a historically ranging, critically intensive, and hands-on learning environment about the technologies by which humans transmit ideas. The course…[Read more]

This chapter situates the Victoria’s Lost Pavilion project (https://pavilion.chass.ncsu.edu/) amid related work in virtual modeling and their interpretive problematics. Drawing from a tradition in textual criticism, the chapter renovates Jerome McGann’s notion of “radiant textuality” to extended virtual objects and built environments in digital…[Read more]

The silent film era, usually defined as 1895-1927, coincided with a revival of belief in spiritualism in America. Desperate to find meaning in the deaths of the Great War and the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, the bereaved sought contact with the dead and evidence of an afterlife. Given this fascination with spiritualism, it is not surprising that the…[Read more]

This essay explores an unprecedented distinction between literary and popular writing that emerged in debates in Maṇikkoṭi and Āṉanta Vikaṭaṉ, two well-known Tamil magazines that were launched in the 1930s. Through short stories and critical essays, the writers who contributed to these magazines attempted to create new lenses through which to v…[Read more]

The first section of David Mitchell’s genre-bending novel, Cloud Atlas (2004), purports to be set in 1850. Narrative clues approximately date the intra-diegetic diary object of this chapter to the period 1851–1910. This article argues for the construction of a stylistic historical imaginary of this period’s language that is not based on mimet…[Read more]

The transfer of Saracen arms into Frankish ownership is a leitmotif of
many chansons de geste, but one whose significance for translatio imperii has yet to be
elucidated. In this essay, I focus on the Chanson d’Aspremont, a twelfth-century epic
set in Calabria that narrates the pre-history of Durendal, Roland’s sword of Song of
Roland fam…[Read more]

Reads William of Rubruck’s mission to Asia as an instance of premodern ethnographic representation and the shape of the precolonial European ethnographic gaze upon Asia.

This article sets the itineracy of antiapartheid expressive culture to work in relation to exiled South African jazz singer Miriam Makeba. It revisits accounts of transnational cultural circulation on the part of Rob Nixon, Paul Gilroy, and others to argue that the diffusion of South African cultural formations outward from South Africa offers…[Read more]

The artist, collector, and critic Charles Ricketts (1866–1931) has often been characterised as a reactionary voice in early-twentieth-century debates about modern art. Although he responded conservatively to modern-art developments such as those embodied by the term ‘Post-Impressionism’, his work in book design and illustration exemplifies p…[Read more]