This is a longer version of my conference paper, in which I provide some ideas on how to merge scholarship on 18th-c France, especially the revolutionary period, with the kinds of advocacy promoted by the MLA. I foreground exciting new work done by colleagues in the US, UK, and Italy, and provide a “sneak peek” at materials to be included in the…[Read more]

MLA Convention January 2016, Abstracts for Session 809

Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is reflection of Pakistani masculinity in a metamorphosed state. A disturbingly masculine vocabulary frames the appearance and actions of the female characters. In contrast, the speech and thought of the male characters is minified in words of loss and regret. Their material ambitions and the r…[Read more]

It has long been acknowledged that syntactic violations in poetry are central to the difficulty of a poetic text (e.g. Fowler 1971, Fois-Kaschel 2002, Burke 2007, Thoms 2008). However, for all its merits, most of the work carried out so far tends either to be more concerned with linguistic theory than with literary effects (i.e. the generativist…[Read more]

This essay argues that greater attention to the significance of the material culture of print, especially in early African American print culture, shows how technologies of racialization emerge in conjunction with technologies of printed words and images. The stereotype is perhaps the most familiar case. In one sense it offers quick reproduction…[Read more]

“¿En qué idioma escribe Ud.?” (142) “In which language are you writing?” This question, that Juan Crisóstomo Ibarra, the protagonist of José Rizal’s novel Noli me tangere (1887), addresses to the old scholar Don Anastasio, better known as Tasio, is more than just an expression of curiosity when he sees the latter writing, of all things, hiero…[Read more]

When it is spoken of at all, Emerson’s “Monadnoc” is described as a solicitation of natural sublimity. But a close rhetorical analysis of the poem reveals greater ambivalence about this sublimity than is apparent—linking it to later American philosophic poems by Frost, Stevens, Ammons, and Kinnell that at once solicit and question natural plenitu…[Read more]

The scraps and orts that survived Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s imprisonment and execution by the Nazis played an influential role in theologies of the second half of the twentieth century, and that influence continues unabated in the twenty-first. Of particular interest has been his speculation on “religionless” Christianity in “a world come of age,” s…[Read more]

mind the gaps: fragments is a digitally printed limited edition of six fragments, four of which are poems that begin with my translations from early Greek thinking (works of Heraclitus, Parmenides, Sappho, and Empedocles). The fifth includes a poem based on my translation of a story included in Plato’s Phaedrus and a hybrid piece built around…[Read more]

This article offers an interdisciplinary perspective on Jean-Luc Godard’s video short Puissance de la parole (1988). It engages with key historical figures in film, visual art and music, positioning Godard’s video mashup as a violent intermedial space where past and future meet. Exploring techniques of fragmentation, decontextualization and rec…[Read more]