Steven Spielberg’s 2002 Minority Report narrates two interrelated stories. The micro
story concerns a family, a kidnapped son, the ensuing trauma, and the work of mourning that
follows. The macro story concerns criminal justice, social stability, and hermeneutics at the level
of the nation state. The problem for both stories is ontological a…[Read more]

This paper discusses Pacific Rim as a film deeply concerned with birth, in particular the horror of birth, and the process by which birth is assimilated. The film may then be seen as part of an unbroken commentary on nuclear
weapons insofar as it is our technological, capitalistic, and nuclear capability that allows
us to close the “breach” and…[Read more]

This essay uses Steven Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) to argue that something
has changed: “Posthumanity” has appeared because our rational assimilation of the world has paused. To be Human is to
lack, to always drive forward while repressing the past, the artifice of our birth, as we mold the
world in our image. However, in a stran…[Read more]

An analysis of the film focused on Christian concepts and, ultimately the work of Bataille and Derrida on the “general economy.”

While the 14 objects in Chris Ware’s Building Stories ‘may,’ after a few readings, be placed in an linear order, there is no way of ensuring coherence in a first reading. The effect is dizzying, and the absent center compels the reader to immense feats of construction. At the minute level of one singular comic, what we get is a relatively coher…[Read more]

My interest is not merely to trace the appearance of the wound motif
throughout Jackson’s trilogy, but also to make an argument about Frodo as a
particular kind of disabled hero whose essence is to remain open to others, by
contrast to Sauron. My central concern is disability, in particular the question
of being, or how the disabled body of F…[Read more]

The Doctor of the 2005 series is not domestic. This is obvious, and perhaps not
that interesting, except for the fact that Russell T. Davies has, arguably, gone to
extreme lengths to accentuate his non-domesticity as a critique of the obsessive human
tendency to domesticate the world, both ideologically and more concretely through
colonialism.…[Read more]

“What follows, then, needs to be understood as involving an ethical critique of concrete political structures and as not simply concerned with the writing of the text before us because, as I will argue, the city along with every subjectival creation is a product of myth. Delany’s text interrogates such monumental myths through a representation o…[Read more]

Early draft of essay eventually published in Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore

In addition to showing how politically oriented Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds
remains despite its playful exterior, this essay constitutes an extended reflection on issues of
power and agency within the postcolonial Irish context. It demonstrates that Irish identity is constructed and controlled via a god-like architecture of temporal and…[Read more]