The following paper attempts a philosophically rigorous interpretation of H.C. Andersen’s tales. Through a radically conceived sentimentality — the unmediated juxtaposition of the abjection of things, conceived as a paradoxical “desire for desire” having no place in the world, with a cruel, apathetic gaze — Andersen challenges the exist…[Read more]

This is an essay on the relation of images and text. It is part of a larger research project online at writingwithimages.com. See that site for the context; the the project’s purpose is to theorize the possibilities of fiction and poetry that are presented alongside images.

“analyses the spectral presence of the phonograph within a digital omnipresence: its afterlife as a material echo of the past… Analyzing audiophilia— basically a desire for material presence — in the apparently disembodied age of the digital, Adler shows how the former is as it were animated as aura by the effects of the latter (infinite…[Read more]

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing. All c…[Read more]

What happens if the homo sacer kills before he can be killed? What if the dispossessed repossess what was taken from them? What if some agent declares a state of exception to the state of exception? Starting from the observation that Agamben and Butler/Athanasiou characterize bare life and the dispossessed, respectively, in terms of radical…[Read more]

This course, under the broad heading of literature and science, takes on the subject of climate change fiction (cli-fi). It was first taught at Antioch College in winter of 2017. The course included field trips to the OSU climate research center, a local nature preserve, and the College’s farm.

In the final pages of J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus and José Saramago’s A Caverna, the main protagonists flee to an unknown destination from their respective “utopias.” Both allegorical novels expose the ills of two guarded and structured communities. A Caverna, a parable of Plato’s cave, depicts the story of the lives of 64-year-old…[Read more]

Through the comparative study of non-Anglophone translations of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, we can achieve the progressive goals of Emily Apter’s “translational transnationalism” and Edward Said’s “cosmopolitan humanism.” Both translation and humanism were intrinsic to Chaucer’s initial composition of the Tales, and in turn, both shap…[Read more]

Hardly a Passus of Piers Plowman goes by without one reference to a Jewish individual, practice, or belief — that is, a Jewish individual, practice or belief as perceived or believed by a Christian observer. Whereas a multitude of these references abound in Piers Plowman, it contains, essentially, only a pair of conventional medieval approaches f…[Read more]

Debates over safe spaces and trigger warnings have become a regular part of campus discourse, especially in context with discussions over free speech, intellectual freedom, and the role that universities play in the social formation. In particular, the University of Chicago entered into the public fray surrounding safe spaces in the fall of 2016…[Read more]

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)