Whatever your theory and whatever your fandom, you don’t have to abandon it to do affect theory. This is because affect theory isn’t about telling you which side to pick in an agonistic contest; it’s about finding out what a body can do as it moves with other bodies in entangled states, whether or not we notice them. Affect theory offers more…[Read more]

This book-length paper is a Brown University dissertation in American literature and literary theory. A theoretical analysis of the concept of authorial intention in narrative fiction, and of its structural and communicational implications, is followed by an in-depth examination of Stephen Crane’s novella ‘The Monster’ (1898) as a case study in…[Read more]

The conference will explore the image of the supernatural city as expressed in narrative media from a variety of epochs and cultures. It will provide an interdisciplinary forum for the development of innovative and creative research and examine the cultural significance of these themes in all their various manifestations. As with previous OGOM…[Read more]

This paper derives from an M.A. dissertation on Stephen Crane (“Reading ‘The Monster’,” Brown University, 1989). It examines the critical reception of Stephen Crane’s story ‘The Monster,’ with a special focus on the issue of racial representation and on the way authorial intentions bearing on this issue are constructed by critics. The critical…[Read more]

Many recent critics of ‘The Faerie Queene’ have established an artificial distinction between the narrator of ‘The Faerie Queene’ and Spenser, one which posits an olympian detachment of the author from the work, and of both from the historical circumstances in which the work was written. An analysis of the poem reveals the limited sense in which a…[Read more]

Este artículo proporciona una visión estructuralista de los conceptos básicos de la narratología literaria, partiendo de los términos necesarios para una definición del concepto mismo de narración. Se propone una representación gráfica de los diferentes niveles de inserción comunicativa en una narración literaria…[Read more]

This paper defines the concepts of literary theory and literary criticism as dialectically related activities, and puts forward a semiotic classification of literary theories. To conclude a preliminary approach to literary theory, it sketches out the origins of literary theorizing and critical practice in pre-philosophical thought and in the Greek…[Read more]

An exercise for a course on deconstructive criticism, with Jacques deconstructing himself and acknowledging that he partakes of Jean-Jacques’s logocentrism.

Given on 6/3/2016 at Birkbeck English and Humanities’ Work In Progress conference

Given on 23/11/2016 at Historical Materialism conference 2016

This is a brief note criticising some anti-foundationalist and anti-essentialist semiotic assumptions in Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, from the standpoint of a classical structuralist perspective which (following Saussure) sees the play of differences as crucially constitutive of a system of positive terms.