‘Dirt’ and ‘Trash’ in Shakespeare’s _Romeo and Juliet_:
Update on the rhetoric of social stratification in R&J…

Gloria McMillan June 21, 2018

Shakespeare in early modern period of English culture demonstrates how modern exogamy (voluntarily marrying outside your group) rattles the social stratification structure in modern western societi…[Read more]

From the Teddy Boys of the post-war decade to the heroin chic of “Cool Britannia,” the many tribes and subcultures of Britain’s teenagers have often been at the forefront of social change. Youth Culture and the Post-War British Novel is the first book to chart that history through the work of the most important contemporary British wri…[Read more]

Jordan and Iraq are not countries that are often associated with a local film culture. Recently, however, a nascent film industry has started to grow in both Iraq and Jordan, producing films that have been shown in international film festivals. Even though the Jordanian film industry remains in its infancy, the films that have emerged of late…[Read more]

In this essay I explore the use of musical mimesis in the score for D. W. Griffith’s 1921 film Orphans of the Storm. I demonstrate that the score, created by Louis F. Gottschalk and William Frederick Peters, offers coherence through the use of central themes and the employment of several characteristic leitmotivs; provides recognizable musical c…[Read more]

Review of Daniel Hack, “Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature” (Princeton UP, 2017).

Polyglot films highlight the coexistence of multiple languages at the level of dialogue and narration. Even the notoriously monolingual Hollywood film industry has recently seen an increase in polyglot productions. Much of Europe’s polyglot cinema reflects on postwar migration. Hamid Naficy has coined the phrase ” accented cinema ” to define…[Read more]

Beginning with television’s popularization and mass availability in the 1950s, TV has extensively been employed to transport and mediate history. From the early televisual experiments of The Twilight Zone and Star Trek to more recent examples such as Quantum Leap, The X-Files and Continuum, Science Fiction television and its subgenre of A…[Read more]

The final two months of 2017 witnessed a renaissance of an always-popular meme on Metafilter, Twitter: parodies of William Carlos Williams’s 1934 poem, “This Is Just to Say.” Parodies typically replace nouns and adjectives in this twelve-line, three-stanza Imagist poem. A minimum of six replacements yields an entirely new poem, such that users…[Read more]

The relationship between obsolescence and innovation in the digital age is a peculiar one, conveying not past and future but instead demonstrating their eternal simultaneity.

Critically surveys the long premodern history of race and racism, colonization and imperialism, and globalism, across c. 1000-1500 CE.

Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various cha…[Read more]

An analysis of criticism of Charles Dickens by his contemporaries G. H. Lewes and Hippolyte Taine. Both assessments address Dickens’s popularity by relying on commonplace concepts from Victorian anthropology. However, Lewes argues for a new form of critical practice addressed to popular fiction and addresses the inadequacy of existing critical…[Read more]

This is the typescript of the Introductory chapter of the book, THE INVENTION OF RACE IN THE EUROPEAN MIDDLE AGES, published on March 8, 2018 by Cambridge UP (503 pp., 8 chapters, 10″ x 7″ format). The book discusses Jews, Muslims, Africans and blackness, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani (“Gypsies”) in 7 chapters, including a critical…[Read more]

This New Rheto rical Continuum Chart for Fiction shows a spectral range between individual (New Critical, structuralist, formalist) approach to group-based (socio-rhetorical) approach to fiction in the 21st Century.

A Robert Brownian Dramatic Dialogue

This article examines Sphinx, the debut novel of the French novelist Anne Garréta, which was recently published in English translation in 2015. The reception of Sphinx in both French and English has focused primarily on Garréta’s virtuosic removal of gender from a love story, passing over a caricatural and crude rendering of racial difference tha…[Read more]

The assertion of the centrality and supremacy of man, or rather, of the idea(l) of humanity, during the Renaissance period, inevitably entailed the repudiation of the animal and the beginning of the great human-animal divide. What was seen, at the time, as the rebirth of man, was also the birth of a rampant anthropocentrism which, until the recent…[Read more]