The Egyptian Surrealist Art et Liberté group was recuperated in two exhibitions beginning in 2016 and continuing through 2018. The larger exhibition by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath emphasizes the group’s internationalism and the complexity of its engagement with various forms of Surrealism, including André Breton and Leon Trotsky’s 1938 manif…[Read more]

This chapter theorizes global Shakespeare through two interrelated concepts: performance as an act of citation and the ethics of citation. Bringing the concept of performance as citation and the ethics of citation together, this chapter argues that acts of appropriation carry with them strong ethical implications. A crucial, ethical component of…[Read more]

In the Arab world, Beckett’s plays or their adaptations have not only been popular with audiences and directors but have also inspired other literary and media genres. The Beckettian wait itself has become synonymous with the condition of the Arab person. It is a wait that offers an unrealized potential of hope that reverberates with the d…[Read more]

Three faculty members from UMass Boston’s English Department—a team responsible for the department’s M.A. course on the Teaching of Literature and for the training of novice teachers of literature—examine the complex process of reading texts that they teach as if they are encountering them as their students do, for the first time. Accepting the p…[Read more]

Drawing on Arabic textual traditions and foregrounding the liminal time and space of administrative detention, of the expired visa, of deportation, and of repatriation, Muslim slave narratives deserve recognition as generative forebears of transnational, multicultural literature in both England and the United States. Yet these forebears were…[Read more]

This essay reexamines the figure of Franz Kafka (1883–1924) in light of his largely ignored, recursive links to circum-Caribbean and Black Atlantic processes of racialized exploitation and corporal punishment. When we centre Kafka’s extensive biographical and literary engagements with these processes, the persistent debate over Kafka’s statu…[Read more]

Cultural memory is actively constructed through embodied and political performances. Tang Xianzu and William Shakespeare, two “national poets” of unequal global stature, have recently become vehicles for British and Chinese cultural diplomacy and exchange during their quatercentenary in 2016. The culture of commemoration is a key factor in Tang’s…[Read more]

As the digital humanities have rapidly gained prominence and attention over the last decade, learning has shifted from individual experiences at training environments such as THATCamps and Institutes to more formal institutional instruction. This means that the number of people teaching digital humanities (DH) has had to increase. Who are these…[Read more]

As a work that survives and appears in more than one form, King Lear has a vexing problem of interpretation and a rich opportunity for the study of textual and cultural variants. The play begins with an aging monarch staging a fantastical, paradoxical final act as a king. It lures us toward a final act of interpretation to nail down the nature of…[Read more]

This undergraduate seminar on author Margaret Atwood fulfills the Major Author course at Stevenson University. Students will read A Trio of Tall Tales and The Year of the Flood, as well as both read and watch The Handmaid’s Tale. The course assignments include live-tweeting, creating a webtext, and an intertextual analysis essay.

This section of 494 provides students with an introduction to the reading, history, and making of comics and graphic novels. Comics have often been associated with popular culture, pulp fiction, and ephemerality. Yet comics merge image and text to create a unique form of sequential art that is becoming ever more visible and influential in our…[Read more]

DTC 356 explores the cultural, aesthetic, and political roles of information and data. Beginning with library classification systems and Wikipedia, the course then turns to the role of metadata in organizing collections and our lives before ending with a consideration of text-mining and topic modeling. The conclusion considers these techniques in…[Read more]

This essay examines the Hindi Nayī Kahānī, or New Story, Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which was influential for the short stories, criticism, and literary history that its writers produced. Incorporating a view toward the larger “metaliterary” corpus in relation to which properly “literary” nayī kahānī texts were written, the essay shows h…[Read more]

Because it is all too easy to (accidentally) make assumptions about what first-year students know about language, in 2019-2020 my lit and comp type courses will begin with a segment on language, before moving on to sentences, paragraphs, and essays.

Our exploration of language will start by jumping into a story, to help us identify the 8 parts…[Read more]

This multilingual undergraduate translation workshop was co-taught in the Spring of 2014 with Prof. Norman Holland in the division of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at Hampshire College. During the course, students were introduced to translation theory and explored key concepts through intralingual translation exercises before embarking on…[Read more]