Cognitive science can help literary scholars formulate specific questions to be answered by archival research. This essay takes as its starting point embedded mental states (that is, mental states about mental states) and their role in generating literary subjectivity. It then follows the transformation of embedded mental states throughout several…[Read more]

Zunshine’s essay draws on recent research in developmental psychology and cognitive evolutionary anthropology to examine emotional responses to supernatural events by the child and adult characters of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816), as well as to revisit the traditional literary critical view of those responses, acc…[Read more]

Review of Consider David Foster Wallace.

This interview with esteemed literary critic J. Hillis Miller was conducted via Skype on July 17, 2013. Miller speaks about a number of issues important to his life and work. Providing a number of emblematic parables, Miller discusses his early career, his work on the poetry of William Carlos Williams, and his famous essay “The Critic as H…[Read more]

This interview with literary critic Jonathan Arac was conducted at the University of Pittsburgh on May 19, 2015. Arac, a member of the boundary 2 editorial collective since 1979, speaks at length about his life and work. Addressing the impact of theory on his career, he discusses how he came to be associated with the New Americanists, his project…[Read more]

Excerpt from first paragraph: In the emerging field of David Foster Wallace studies, nothing has been more widely cited in terms of understanding Wallace’s literary project than two texts that appeared in the 1993 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction” and a lengthy interview with Larry McCaf…[Read more]

This essay historically situates David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as a transitional text between the first and second nuclear ages. Written in the immediate wake of the Cold War, Infinite Jest complexly develops the nuclear trope’s fabulously textual persistence despite the relative disappearance of the discourse of Mutually Assured Des…[Read more]

McDonagh is arguably one of the most celebrated yet most controversial of contemporary Anglo-Irish playwrights. His plays have received mixed reviews from critics and audiences alike, mostly for featuring graphic violence and obscene dialogues. Even though comedy is mostly seen as an inferior genre compared to tragedy, McDonagh, among many…[Read more]

The main objective of this article is to examine the representation of ʻhomelandʼ in three short stories by Caribbean-American writer Edwidge Danticat: “The Book of the Dead,” “Night Talkers,” and “The Gift.” All three stories represent Haitian migrants in the multi-cultural setting of the United States. A central theme that connects these stories…[Read more]

This essay argues that an antiracist, anticolonialist Victorian studies must remain open to universalizing claims of the kind found in early works of queer theory, particularly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Although recent work in queer studies (as well as literary studies generally) finds inspiration in Sedgwick’s…[Read more]

Salaria Kea was the only African American woman to serve with the American Medical Unit during the Spanish Civil War. Her experience has been silenced and edited within the archive by traditionally more authoritative voices. Reconsidering the impact of intersectionality on personal experience can lead to a better understanding of Black U.S.…[Read more]

Transatlantic literary exchange depended, during the 19th and earlier 20th centuries, on the ocean liner. Books and periodicals were exported via sea routes, lent among passengers or through ships’ libraries, and even bought and sold on board. The High Seas Bookshops, established on some Anchor Line vessels in the 1920s, strikingly demonstrate the…[Read more]