Transatlantic literary exchange depended, during the 19th and earlier 20th centuries, on the ocean liner. Books and periodicals were exported via sea routes, lent among passengers or through ships’ libraries, and even bought and sold on board. The High Seas Bookshops, established on some Anchor Line vessels in the 1920s, strikingly demonstrate the…[Read more]

The forty poems in this collection have percolated through more than forty years of meditation on “city” that began when I was an undergraduate studying with Richard Luecke at Valparaiso University. The title, In the Path of Totality, references a phrase made familiar by media coverage leading up to the total solar eclipse that was visible acr…[Read more]

There is an all at once quality to lyric poetry that makes it akin to mysticism. It knows there is more to vision than meets the eye. It takes the whole world in while knowing the whole of it is always known imperfectly, always here, always now. The here and now of the seventy-one poems in Steven Schroeder’s new collection is most often Chicago,…[Read more]

In the spirit of the old Shaker hymn, the poems in Steven Schroeder’s new collection turn and turn – from a question Laozi raises to Woody Guthrie’s holy ground, from Chicago to Texas to Shenzhen to Macao, in conversation with poets and philosophers from Euclid and Thoreau to Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Gertrude Stein, Buddy Holly, Lyle Lovet…[Read more]

Series of Powerpoint slides. Background on the limited time of faculty at “the 99%” of institutions (Francisco and O’Dair) to conduct research and thus the importance of not wasting that labor by choosing inappropriate venues. Overview of types of journal, and suggestions for using reflection prompts, the MLA directory of Periodicals, and a…[Read more]

James Agee’s complicated life and complex work have elicited varied critical responses, but none thus far by way of the writer’s intriguing relationship with his sometime analyst Frances Wickes. I believe Agee’s autobiographical writings prove both intertextual with and influenced by Wickes’s work, especially in regard to her novel and to The Mor…[Read more]

Considering the institutionalized forms of ecophobia in the United States, is it necessary to enact a Civil Rights of Nature?

In Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s As Intermitências da Morte (2005) and in Mahmoud Darwish’s epic poem Mural (2000), the authors contemplate the nothingness that accompanies death, a concern that increasingly permeates their later writings. Although ‘death’ is depicted differently, the authors fear that with death “the universe wo…[Read more]

This article explores the tradition of Bacha Posh in Afghan culture as depicted in Afghan-American Nadia Hashimiʼs debut novel The Pearl that Broke its Shell (2014). In this novel, Hashimi shows how Afghan girls are obliged to cross-dress and live dual lives as boys for several years to lay claim for their rights to education and freedom of…[Read more]

In The Night Watchman (2020), Louise Erdrich continues to blur the lines between history and fiction as she has done in several of her novels. Erdrich introduces the reader to several magical elements that appear to be entirely real: two ghosts, a dog that talks, and an unearthly powwow with Jesus as one of the dancers. The main objective of this…[Read more]

Examines the intersection between Chan Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism during the Southern Song dynasty period (1126-1279) in China.

This is a slightly revised version of the text of a talk that I (Seo-Young Chu) gave as part of the Fall 2014 Franke Lectures in the Humanities at Yale University. I’m sharing the text here to make the lecture more accessible. Topics include: North Korea/the DPRK, the “uncanny body politic,” the uncanny valley, “dystopian poetics,” what it means…[Read more]

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr’s anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths…[Read more]

In “I, Stereotype,” Seo-Young Chu applies Mori’s theory of the uncanny valley not to robots but to a different species of humanoid artifact: stereotypes of the “yellow peril.” Through analyses of stories by Sax Rohmer, World War Two propaganda, and films from the Bond franchise, Chu investigates ways in which the logic of the uncanny valley has…[Read more]

In this essay we reinterpret Camus’s novel The Plague in light of the urgency of history, that with Covid 19 pandemia made us face a real pestilence, thus allowing us to read reality and fiction as even. Our rereading relativizes the traditional allegoric interpretation of critics, while at the same time it widens its perspectives. It is in fact i…[Read more]