This is an essay on the relation of images and text. It is part of a larger research project online at writingwithimages.com. See that site for the context; the the project’s purpose is to theorize the possibilities of fiction and poetry that are presented alongside images.

Starting out from an analysis of the “Art of the Deal,” this paper seeks to understand Trump’s “deal-making” as a form of life under capitalism organized around the paradoxical desire to simultaneously “be the game” and be the “biggest winner”— In this way, Trump exemplifies a modern pathological form of existence whose proximate roots can be…[Read more]

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing. All c…[Read more]

Imagine a humanities network with the sharing power of Academia.edu, the archival quality of an institutional repository, and a commitment to using and contributing to open source software. Now imagine that this network is not-for-profit. It doesn’t want to sell your data or generate profit from your intellectual property. That’s Humanities Com…[Read more]

Debates over safe spaces and trigger warnings have become a regular part of campus discourse, especially in context with discussions over free speech, intellectual freedom, and the role that universities play in the social formation. In particular, the University of Chicago entered into the public fray surrounding safe spaces in the fall of 2016…[Read more]

Examining gay journalism as gay liberation literature, this essay forwards a cultural history of sexuality informed by comparative urban and queer studies. My main argument is that gay liberation literature under apartheid lags behind important shifts in sexual activism; and my larger aim is to extend the valences of postcolonial queer studies…[Read more]

This article raises questions about the aesthetics of scale as they appear relative to genetically modified organisms in science fiction and especially in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009). Bacigalupi makes the unusual choice of representing GMOs largely through science fictional tropes of automatism rather than the grotesque. Because of t…[Read more]

This article describes how the novelist David Mitchell employs the “topos of the cult,” a set of conventions that describe a mental state of unfreedom, in the novels Ghostwritten (1999) and Cloud Atlas (2004). This figuration of an unfree form of society—characterized by a group’s specialized language, closed social spaces, and charismatic leade…[Read more]

I employ distant reading techniques and data visualization tools to assess the literary criticism of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. My findings suggest that the scholarly literary criticism of Things Fall Apart did not occur independently with the publication of Achebe’s work in 1958, but was a part of a larger trend in literary criticism a…[Read more]

I employ distant reading techniques and data visualization tools to assess the literary criticism of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. My findings suggest that the scholarly literary criticism of Things Fall Apart did not occur independently with the publication of Achebe’s work in 1958, but was a part of a larger trend in literary criticism a…[Read more]