In The Night Watchman (2020), Louise Erdrich continues to blur the lines between history and fiction as she has done in several of her novels. Erdrich introduces the reader to several magical elements that appear to be entirely real: two ghosts, a dog that talks, and an unearthly powwow with Jesus as one of the dancers. The main objective of this…[Read more]

Examines the intersection between Chan Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism during the Southern Song dynasty period (1126-1279) in China.

In this essay we reinterpret Camus’s novel The Plague in light of the urgency of history, that with Covid 19 pandemia made us face a real pestilence, thus allowing us to read reality and fiction as even. Our rereading relativizes the traditional allegoric interpretation of critics, while at the same time it widens its perspectives. It is in fact i…[Read more]

An innovative account that brings together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary history to examine patterns of “mindreading” in a wide range of literary works.

A review article focused on phenomenological method and Christian thought in Marie-Aimée Manchon’s book _Alentour du verses: Petite phénoménologie des Mystère_ (Ad Solem, 2019).

This essay explores Dante Alighieri’s notion of projectile motion in relation to spiritual fulfillment in the first canto of Paradiso. The notion of impetus, or projectile motion, stood at the confluence of Greek philosophical rationality (mediated by a substantial Arabic corpus) and Christian thought, and it provides a unique window through…[Read more]

This chapter examines the plight of Fra’ Alberigo in light of philosophical questions of personal identity and embodiment. I argue that Fra’ Alberigo’s individuality and his punishment in Tolomea provides insight into Dante’s unique interpretation of the complex relationship between body and spirit and the issue of material continuity in the…[Read more]

Example of how to set up a policy of Oops Tokens to build flexibility into attendance policies. This idea comes from the book Specifications Grading by Linda Nilson via Flower Darby’s book Small Teaching Online.

A sharply critical response to Shelby Steele’s first book, The Content of Our Character.

The aestheticism of Walter Pater and Vernon Lee participated in a late-nineteenth-century discourse devoted to exploring the aesthetic’s role in producing and sustaining, as well as undermining, notions of racial difference. Pater’s “A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew” (1876) and Lee’s “Dionea” (1890) partake of Immanue…[Read more]

This essay focuses on Olive Schreiner’s personal correspondence and the allegories collected in Dreams (1890) to explore her complicated relationship to late-Victorian Decadence. I argue that Schreiner modified Decadent writers’ use of intersensoriality and synaesthesia to educate her readers into a new kind of common sense, one aligned with her…[Read more]

To encourage classroom dialectic I often turn to the “quitting” structure of “The Canterbury Tales,” within which pilgrims offer requitals of previous tales that range from exuberant acclamations to
raucous attacks. Within these extremes lie productive forms of correction that emerge as subtle critiques, opposing arguments, and timely (or…[Read more]

Gene Wolfe, living though Severian, re-experiences via Thecla’s characterization of him as not being worth enough to value highly for being what he thought he could only amount to her when he first met her, that is, simply a boy at hand, his own once being lured into the attentions’ of his mother and then dismissed by her when she was done usi…[Read more]

Gene Wolfe, living though Severian, re-experiences via Thecla’s characterization of him as not being worth enough to value highly for being what he thought he could only amount to her when he first met her, that is, simply a boy at hand, his own once being lured into the attentions’ of his mother and then dismissed by her when she was done usi…[Read more]