Death drives the contemporary American novel and its market in the late-20th and early 21st-century. To help illustrate this, we consider Don DeLillo’s White Noise from 1985 and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road from 2006 for something that Walter Benjamin — famously quoted as saying “Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell” — ma…[Read more]

A review of Andreas Huyssen’s “Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film” (2015)

A review of Andreas Huyssen’s “Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film” (2015)

This paper examines textiles as an indicator of social class in the sentimental novels of the American long 1850s. Publications such as Godey’s Lady’s Book (1830) and Lady’s World of Fashion (1842) are credited with creating the ties between social status and textile quality. Yet, domestic novels of the long 1850s such as The Discarded Daugh…[Read more]

This handout serves as a guide for student peer-reviewers to provide useful feedback to the writer. The open-ended questions walk the reviewer through the rhetorical analysis essay and provide a structure for evaluating the thesis, organization, rhetorical strategies, and use of pathos, ethos, logos, and kairos in the paper. The Rhetorical…[Read more]

Fantastic tales of rebellious robots and animated artifacts are a permanent fixture in popular culture. What kind of behavior do we expect from such conceptual hybrids in science fiction, nonsense poetry, and surrealist art?

On performativity of Dickens as author in his prefaces

An approach to understanding modernism in literary history through the lens of translation by tracing the work of key figures such as Pound, Dos Passos, Jiménez, and Unamuno to translate US and Spanish literatures after the Spanish-American War of 1898.