This essay maps out a six-year literary transformation of Paris noir from 1957 to 1963 that overlaps with the Algerian war for independence from France (1954–1962). In this journey that transits from Parisian utopianism to postcolonial criticism, from Richard Wright and James Baldwin’s love songs to racially liberal Paris to William Gardner S…[Read more]

Marie Darrieussecq’s Clèves (2011) shocked readers with the vulgarity of its language and spurred controversy over its status as a literary text. In this article, I show how the novel’s “bad” language is a foil for Darrieussecq’s larger project of rewriting the adolescent female body, removing it from the sexualized and objectified optic through…[Read more]

The article focuses on the restoration of the collections of paintings and drawings of E. E. Cummings in Brockport, New York. It is inferred that the Hildegarde Lasell Watson Collection has sustained a mass of damage over the last 25 years, and that efforts for its conservation have consistently been delayed. It discusses the contents and the…[Read more]

Digital reading is not just a matter of new media; it is a new cognitive activity that Proust’s writing seems to have anticipated. Our goal is to demonstrate that the “branching and responding text” that was announced by Ted Nelson in Litary Machines corresponds in its very logic and patterns to the new writing style that is to be observed in Pr…[Read more]

Between 1988 and 1994 American comic books engaged the politics, problematics, and crises of the AIDS epidemic by injecting the virus and its social, cultural, and epidemiological effects on gay men into the four-color fantasies of the superhero genre. As the comic-book industry was undergoing major internal changes that allowed for more mature,…[Read more]

On many occasions cinema has chosen to shoot movies in locales other than the ones in which the events of the films are supposed to take place in. This could be due to various reasons, namely cheaper production costs, or inability to gain access to the original place. The choice of location, however, tries to provide a mirror image of the…[Read more]

Media representations of Arabs and terrorists.

n her treatise on abjection, Julia Kristeva argues that the abject is located outside the self, remaining in a state of repulsion that threatens to destroy the self. Abject representations are prevalent in the way terrorists have been portrayed in the Western news media post-September 11, 2001. These images of abjection are problematic, as they…[Read more]

Code switching is a practice exercised by multilingual speakers. Linguists define the term as the simultaneous use of more than one language. Code switching is prevalent in postcolonial countries in which the colonial language has continued to exist alongside the native language. In the past, code switching in the Arab world has been confined to…[Read more]

The changes that have been witnessed by media in the Arab world have redefined media’s initial role as a source of information. With the advent of satellite television new realities, namely the dismantling of communication boundaries, have emerged. At first, such advancements posed a challenge to government bodies, specifically in the Arab region;…[Read more]

A video essay about title sequences from films by Alfred Hitchcock and David Fincher. An exploration of motion graphic design from analog to digital.

This primer in “cognitive cultural studies” explores the cultural fantasy of perfect access to mind through body. It shows that different genres and media—movies, novels, classic Chinese operas, medieval ribald tales, musicals, paintings, documentaries, stand-up comedy, and photography—have different strategies for making us think that we have ju…[Read more]

Du paletot idéal de «Ma Bohème » à la robe de laine des anges de Mystique, les tissus se dématérialisent dans la poésie de Rimbaud. La portée du champ sémantique des étoffes et des vêtements dans l’œuvre du poète de Charleville structure, avec d’autres thèmes, l’esthétique de la Voyance. Le monde s’habille, en effet, d’âme, tandis que l’âme…[Read more]

If synesthesia is rare in “Le Spleen de Paris”, it is also differently constructed and shaped than in the Fleurs du Mal. This article aims to demonstrate that this evolution points out a shift in Baudelaire’s esthetics, that from Unity of Univers seems to move towards fragmentation of reality: actually, from Baudelaire to Proust.
Abstract in…[Read more]