Marie Darrieussecq’s Clèves (2011) shocked readers with the vulgarity of its language and spurred controversy over its status as a literary text. In this article, I show how the novel’s “bad” language is a foil for Darrieussecq’s larger project of rewriting the adolescent female body, removing it from the sexualized and objectified optic through…[Read more]

John Milton is a hero to Millennials: C. S. Lewis based Perelandra on Paradise Lost; Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy mirrors the epic; Mark Morris’s best ballet is “L’Allegro and Il Penseroso”; digital artist Terrance Lindall created virtual images of Paradise Lost for the Oxford U. Press; Comus is the originator and lead Krewe for…[Read more]

This syllabus delineates the readings and assignments for an advanced undergraduate course on the history and theory of the novel taught in fall 2014 at the University of Georgia.

A book review of Jerome McGann’s A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

Unlike his earlier novels, J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, has not received the attention that it deserves from the critics. The novel, which is set in Russia not only draws on real aspects of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s life but also on certain events in the Russian author’s novels, specifically The Devils. Coetzee’s Dostoevsky is an aging a…[Read more]

This course, designed for a graduate program in education which focuses on leadership, explores works of literature that have had a significant cultural impact and shaped ways in which societies view social issues from the perspective of how leadership is enacted within the texts. For students from disciplines outside of literature studies, this…[Read more]

In this essay, I follow debates about forms and sites of memorialization in post- Soviet Belarus. Begun during perestroika, the public discussions about Khatyn’ and Kuropaty eventually evolved into persistent attempts to realign the Soviet past along new narrative axes. Most prominently, this discursive reformatting of the socialist experience w…[Read more]

[from pp. 151-52:]

“Not only do we ourselves treat fictional characters as if they were capable of a broad variety of mental states (as real people are) to make sense of the story when we first read it; not only do we casually refer to these characters’ and the author’s mental states in our subsequent discussions with students; not only do we…[Read more]

Is There Tunisian Literature? Emergent Writing and Fractal Proliferation of Minor Voices.
The article presents the Tunisian literature from the non-local perspective of the global literary market and the circulation of translated literature. The minor status of the studied phenomenon becomes obvious even when the Tunisian literature is compared…[Read more]

This primer in “cognitive cultural studies” explores the cultural fantasy of perfect access to mind through body. It shows that different genres and media—movies, novels, classic Chinese operas, medieval ribald tales, musicals, paintings, documentaries, stand-up comedy, and photography—have different strategies for making us think that we have ju…[Read more]

Introduction to Modernism: Evolution of an Idea, which traces the emergence and coherence of the term “modernism”, and the field of modernist studies, from the late 1800s to the present.

In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the chapter:

Ungleichzeitigkeit and global modernisms

Over the last twenty-five years, the modernist canon has been significantly revised as theoretical and empirical interventions have emphasised its transnational and globalised patterns of connection through a range of disciplinary…[Read more]

The chapter offers a close reading of two cinematic cases, Andrei Zviagintsev’s Elena (2011) and Govorukhin’s Voroshilov Sniper, in order to demonstrate in a reverse engineering move how publically executed punishments of the late 1990s were translated into quiet murders a decade later. This transition from ‘punishments outside the law’ to ‘crimes…[Read more]

The chapter offers a close reading of two cinematic cases, Andrei Zviagintsev’s Elena (2011) and Govorukhin’s Voroshilov Sniper, in order to demonstrate in a reverse engineering move how publically executed punishments of the late 1990s were translated into quiet murders a decade later. This transition from ‘punishments outside the law’ to ‘crimes…[Read more]