The history of American musical theater is deeply interwoven with the history of American Jews. This course examines how Jews have taken part in musical theater on multiple levels-as composers, lyricists, producers, and performers, among other roles. It also examines how Jews are depicted in Broadway musicals, with particular attention to gender…[Read more]

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot ends in both acts with the two tramps not moving in spite of agreeing that they should leave. Even though Vladimir and Estragon realize the futility of their wait, they remain adamant in the hope that Godot may arrive. Likewise, the Unnamable who cannot go on chooses to go on. What essentially translates in b…[Read more]

From the Teddy Boys of the post-war decade to the heroin chic of “Cool Britannia,” the many tribes and subcultures of Britain’s teenagers have often been at the forefront of social change. Youth Culture and the Post-War British Novel is the first book to chart that history through the work of the most important contemporary British wri…[Read more]

This article focuses on three post-9/11 meta-poems – “My Wife Says Don’t Write About September 11th” by Ryan G. Van Cleave, “How to Write A Poem After September 11th” by Nikki Moustaki and “To the Words” by W. S. Merwin – to demonstrate the point that the current scholarly understanding of post-9/11 aesthetics as something functioning like…[Read more]

Despite their commitment to Ezra Pound’s commandment to “make it new!:” modernist authors like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, and Thornton Wilder referred to Jane Austen surprisingly often in their public and private writings. Although they excoriated her sexual inexperience and limited…[Read more]

Review of Daniel Hack, “Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature” (Princeton UP, 2017).

The relationship between obsolescence and innovation in the digital age is a peculiar one, conveying not past and future but instead demonstrating their eternal simultaneity.

The twenty-first century has seen a transformation of twentieth-century narrative and historical discourse. On the one hand, the Cold War national fantasy of mutually assured destruction has multiplied, producing a diverse array of apocalyptic visions. On the other, there has been an increasing sobriety about human finitude, especially considered…[Read more]

Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various cha…[Read more]

Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition (1901) is overwhelmingly understood as an historical novel. Critics have again and again focused on its journalistic historicity; its ambivalent racial politics; its attitudes towards assimilation, separatism, vengeance, and resistance; and Chesnutt’s alleged biographical identification with various cha…[Read more]

An analysis of criticism of Charles Dickens by his contemporaries G. H. Lewes and Hippolyte Taine. Both assessments address Dickens’s popularity by relying on commonplace concepts from Victorian anthropology. However, Lewes argues for a new form of critical practice addressed to popular fiction and addresses the inadequacy of existing critical…[Read more]

This New Rheto rical Continuum Chart for Fiction shows a spectral range between individual (New Critical, structuralist, formalist) approach to group-based (socio-rhetorical) approach to fiction in the 21st Century.

The Stars our Destination is a story of overcoming anxieties and biases from war, as well as other growing up issues in a steel mill town. Over time, the three main characters gradually converge. Two women have nightmares involving the past and the old Prof. Daniel Blei lives off and on in a flood of troubling recollections. The conclusion will…[Read more]

A Robert Brownian Dramatic Dialogue

Part of the Introduction in lieu of an abstract:
Christopher Isherwood’s celebrated novel A Single Man portrays a gay man as an ordinary human being. For its time, the novel’s depiction of homosexuality as a legitimate minoritarian identity, rather than individual pathology, was a radical political gesture. Given this context, literary critics…[Read more]