While 30 April 1975 represented the end of hostilities between North and South Vietnam, it was not the end of internecine conflicts. The victorious communists treated Southerners with contempt and subjected them to humiliation and violence, including incarceration in so-called re-education camps. Dương Thu Hương served in the Women’s Youth Briga…[Read more]

While scholars have long considered John Keats’s Ode to Psyche a document of secularization, the poem’s precise relationship to the secular needs further attention. This essay engages with recent critiques of secularism, by Gil Anidjar and others, which challenge readings of Keats that make secularism or “toleration” a hallmark of his radical…[Read more]

When James Macpherson turned to the popular poetry of ancient Scotland, he found in it what philosophers now call folk psychology: a commonsense theory about how minds work. Yet because his poems were largely forgeries, Macpherson winds up importing more recent physiology into his portrayal of ancient, pagan materialism. As a result, the poems’ v…[Read more]