Henrietta Rose-Innes’s novel Nineveh (2011) catalogs the activities of a humane pest expert as she discovers, on an estate under construction outside Cape Town, how human and insect actors undermine the spatial expectations of post-apartheid South Africa. Rose-Innes advances a vision of interspecies connection by recasting controversial themes…[Read more]

Does the shift away from following or portraying the typical Asian male in my own life help Asians as a whole? Yes. Doing so can help Asian-Americans because it might allow others who view or interact with me to then change their perceptions about other Asian males and help them be more open-minded and accepting. This personal essay explores such notions.

Does the shift away from following or portraying the typical Asian male in my own life help Asians as a whole? Yes. Doing so can help Asian-Americans because it might allow others who view or interact with me to then change their perceptions about other Asian males and help them be more open-minded and accepting. This personal essay explores such notions.

a bibliography-in-progress for cognitive literary, film, theater, and media studies

“The New American Scholar” by John Hansen

We say, you belong to me, or I belong to you. But is it possible to be possessed by others? And can we ever possess ourselves? In this raw and intimate account, Eva-Lynn Jagoe merges memoir with critical theory as she recounts the unraveling of everything she thought she knew about selfhood, relationships, and desire. Through the story of an…[Read more]

This work provides a close linguistic and thematic analysis of the dialogues in the two novels Midaq Alley by N. Mahfouz and Rosa Mistika by E. Kezilahabi, as they reflect fundamental assumptions about gender, tradition, and modernity. Certain complex clauses that have been traditionally recognized in Logic and Philosophy to be used in argument…[Read more]

The Oulipo has claimed that foreign member, Italo Calvino, was a key proponent of the clinamen, a purposeful deviation from the strict constraints in which the group specializes. However, upon closer inspection, Calvino’s Oulipian production during his Paris period does not seem to advance a formalized definition of this tool of constrained w…[Read more]

The Oulipo has claimed that foreign member, Italo Calvino, was a key proponent of the clinamen, a purposeful deviation from the strict constraints in which the group specializes. However, upon closer inspection, Calvino’s Oulipian production during his Paris period does not seem to advance a formalized definition of this tool of constrained w…[Read more]

This article reconsiders the post-war reaction against Benedetto Croce, focusing on the critical reappraisal of Crocean historicism that followed the defeat of Italian Fascism. Motivated by a growing sense of historical uncertainty, Italians increasingly dissented from Croce, but they remained more wedded to Crocean thought – and in particular t…[Read more]

Would you like to get better at mindreading (i.e., at inferring people’s beliefs, desires, and intentions, based on their behavior)? As it turns out, all you would have to do is lower your relative social status. Studies have shown that people in weaker social positions engage in more active and perceptive mindreading than do people in stronger s…[Read more]

From 1756 until his death in the early 1790s, Primus Fowle, an enslaved African American, performed typographical and press work involved the in the publication of The New-Hampshire Gazette and other materials printed at the press owned by Daniel Fowle. With the archive of print Primus Fowle created as its object of study, this essay historicizes…[Read more]