This rhetorical analysis of the phrase “The Rust Belt” asks the question Is The Rust Belt real or mythical? Does Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Subaltern’ caste now inhabit the (so-called) Rust Belt? Why can’t Rust Belt writers be heard?
“The Rust Belt” is not a title anyone living there would have chosen and yet we use it. Why? Also why should we depend…[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 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

Abstract: This article evaluates the application of dominant institutional discourses, such as psychoanalysis, in the interpretation of literary fiction. I take up the case of Jean Rhys and her 1929 novel _Quartet_. Both author and novel have been analyzed through the concept of masochism, as creating masochistic characters or a masochistic…[Read more]

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]

In recent years, the practices of symptomatic reading have been called into question by scholars such as Stephen Best, Sharon Marcus, Cathy N. Davidson, David Theo Goldberg, Rita Felski and Bruno Latour. It is claimed that such reading has become either formulaic or politically inefficacious. This article argues, against such thinking, that Emily…[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]