Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s attenuation of language, the French Nobel Prize laureate Gao Xingjian has conducted various language experiments in his literary creations in the past two decades. Gao’s literary works, as Diaspora literature, have received extensive attention from European readers due to their Western modernist literary style, the aut…[Read more]

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

An essay written for “Neuroscience and Fiction,” a special issue of SubStance guest-edited by Pierre Casso-Nogues

Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature is the first anthology exploring human cognition and literature in the context of early modern Spanish culture. It includes the leading voices in the field, along with the main themes and directions that this important area of study has been producing. The book begins with an overview of the…[Read more]

In 2003, David Mitchell’s editorial contact at the US branch of Random House moved from the publisher, leaving the American edition of Cloud Atlas (2004) without an editor for approximately three months. Meanwhile, the UK edition of the manuscript was undergoing a series of editorial changes and rewrites that were never synchronised back into t…[Read more]

Būqālah refers both to a ceramic pitcher as well as to poems ritually embedded in the traditional, favorite, divinatory pastime associated with women city dwellers of specific Algerian towns such as Blida,Cherchell, Tlemcen, Constantine, and Algiers. This essay considers the shift from orality to a written archive of French and Algerian c…[Read more]

I’m taking the word “synagogue” seriously, and read Erkenwald’s judge as symbolically “Jewish,” a figure of the sclerotic quality of the law, a foil for Christianity’s uncertain relationship to its own law. I’ll probably publish this before my career’s over, but clearly I’m in no hurry….

The attached syllabus was written for my graduate seminar “Digital Editing and Curation,” taught to 8 PhD students/candidates at UNC Chapel Hill in Spring 2016. The course description is as follows:

“This course introduces students to book history and scholarly editing through the frameworks of media studies and digital humanities. In this…[Read more]

Balkan universities are in a hurry to beat Oxbridge and Ivy League universities. But, from their dire straits, can Balkan teachers afford the train ticket to compare and contrast? Therefore, in this paper we will talk about the situation in the higher education system in the Former Yugoslav countries which has lost its vigour and rigour with the…[Read more]

attempt to bring the horrors of the indo-china war to the most intimate part of women, 1967, xuan loc, rvn

For an MLA panel, January 2016, this talk recalls the 2014 crisis at the University of Virginia about an alleged fraternity gang rape, discusses the policy on sexual assault that designates “responsible employees,” and proposes measures: change drinking laws; avoid segregating any space by identity; offer responsible parties. Humanities professors…[Read more]