Marie Darrieussecq’s Clèves (2011) shocked readers with the vulgarity of its language and spurred controversy over its status as a literary text. In this article, I show how the novel’s “bad” language is a foil for Darrieussecq’s larger project of rewriting the adolescent female body, removing it from the sexualized and objectified optic through…[Read more]

Syllabus for an advanced graduate course on realism and the Victorian novel taught at Temple University in Fall 2015.

Syllabus for an advanced graduate course on realism and the Victorian novel taught at Temple University in Fall 2015.

John Milton is a hero to Millennials: C. S. Lewis based Perelandra on Paradise Lost; Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy mirrors the epic; Mark Morris’s best ballet is “L’Allegro and Il Penseroso”; digital artist Terrance Lindall created virtual images of Paradise Lost for the Oxford U. Press; Comus is the originator and lead Krewe for…[Read more]

This essay explores the meanings and effects of postcolonial authors’ recent refashioning of classical historical fiction. That refashioning has two aims: a materialist cartography that counters the nationalist vocation of classical historical fiction by revealing the supra-national, global aspirations of colonial capitalism as a system; and an e…[Read more]

This syllabus delineates the readings and assignments for an advanced undergraduate course on the history and theory of the novel taught in fall 2014 at the University of Georgia.

This syllabus delineates the readings and assignments for an advanced undergraduate course on the history and theory of the novel taught in fall 2014 at the University of Georgia.

This syllabus delineates the readings and assignments for an advanced undergraduate course on the history and theory of the novel taught in fall 2014 at the University of Georgia.

In his introduction to Mourid Barghouti novel, I saw Ramallah, Edward Said refers to the Palestinians as a displaced and a misplaced people. Regardless of the nationalities they carry or countries they live in, they carry with them the trauma of events that led to the loss of their homeland, and the grief of this loss and endless displacement.…[Read more]

Unlike his earlier novels, J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, has not received the attention that it deserves from the critics. The novel, which is set in Russia not only draws on real aspects of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s life but also on certain events in the Russian author’s novels, specifically The Devils. Coetzee’s Dostoevsky is an aging a…[Read more]

Unlike his earlier novels, J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, has not received the attention that it deserves from the critics. The novel, which is set in Russia not only draws on real aspects of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s life but also on certain events in the Russian author’s novels, specifically The Devils. Coetzee’s Dostoevsky is an aging a…[Read more]

Unlike his earlier novels, J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, has not received the attention that it deserves from the critics. The novel, which is set in Russia not only draws on real aspects of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s life but also on certain events in the Russian author’s novels, specifically The Devils. Coetzee’s Dostoevsky is an aging a…[Read more]

Although Plato’s Utopia or ideal city is the non-place that holds the promise of perfection, it remains the place in which citizens are categorized by a rigid structure. José Saramago, on the other hand, introduces us to a dystopia in his novel Blindness, in which one event leads to the ruin of a city. Yet, as with Plato’s Utopia, a similar…[Read more]

Examiner/examined, analyst/analysand, subject/object, sane/mad, science/art: the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature appears to conform to this binary logic, with the first term in each set clearly privileged over the second. The realm of the literary is populated with an impressive assortment of mad characters and mad authors:…[Read more]

This course, designed for a graduate program in education which focuses on leadership, explores works of literature that have had a significant cultural impact and shaped ways in which societies view social issues from the perspective of how leadership is enacted within the texts. For students from disciplines outside of literature studies, this…[Read more]