A talk given at the ANT workshop at the University of Southern Denmark in 2017. I develop some of these ideas in chapter 4 of my current book

Explores the ability of the narrator to be honest with the difficulties — not displace, repress, elide/evade concerns — they had in their mother-child relationship, in several works of literature, including Cocteau’s “Les Enfants Terribles,” Alice Munro’s “Lives of Girls and Women.” and Andrea Ashworth’s “Once in a House on Fire.”

Explores how “Ode to a Grecian Urn” reads as a discovery of the discovery for the poet of the importance of an object, not primarily as something he might master, but something he submits to. Story of the withdrawal of status, and re-projection of “art,” status, onto an object, after brief experience of the effects of being abandoned its authority.

Argues that the way in which Marlow is presented, ensures that Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” is vulnerable as a text that ostensibly helps justify the maintenance of separate spheres between men and women; argues that Marlow’s successful agency is more about his being craftily evasive, a man who doesn’t impose but dodges.

Argues that the way in which Marlow is presented, ensures that Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” is vulnerable as a text that ostensibly helps justify the maintenance of separate spheres between men and women; argues that Marlow’s successful agency is more about his being craftily evasive, a man who doesn’t impose but dodges.

Explores how Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” reads exactly as the sort of clinging back to a projected mother-figure, after freedom began to spell feelings of abandonment that psychically were proving increasingly intolerable, that object relations therapists finds in patients. Delineates how much of the story amounts to a tussle between…[Read more]

Alfonso de Toledo (15th century) was, indeed, a curious guy. But he was doing something with his curiosity. He was researching and translating. He was focusing on particular themes and institutions, and giving a legal and juridical reading of them –he, as he confesses, has very little theology to forget, so even theological inventions are, for h…[Read more]

This study focuses on the cultural history of illegitimacy and its representation in literature, with an emphasis on the gender of fictional bastards and foundlings.

“Race” offers a compelling study of ideas related to race throughout history. Its breadth of coverage, both geographically and temporally, provides readers with an expansive, global understanding of the term from the classical period onwards: Intersections of Race and Gender // Race and Social Theory Identity // Ethnicity, and Immigration //…[Read more]

Exploration of how “Silas Marner” is George Eliot’s means to distinguish herself from those who are truly guilty of abandoning parental mores… ancestors, parents, themselves. An argument is made that the reason for the text is as provision for the author to temporarily relieve herself of guilt.

How and why do we read? And what is the relationship between academic reading and the reading we do for pleasure? This course is divided into two parts. The first part, on critical reading, surveys some of the most influential critical approaches in recent decades, including structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism,…[Read more]

Full collection of essays written during my undergraduate and graduate studies in literature.

While there are differences between cultures in different places and times, colonial representations of indigenous peoples generally suggest they are not capable of literature nor are they worthy of being represented as nations. Colonial representations of indigenous people continue on into the independence era and can still be detected in our…[Read more]

This thematic session of the journal is devoted to expressions of creative writing inspired by monuments. Our aim is to understand how and why diverse re/constructions of their specific genesis, descriptions of architectural features, explanations of symbolism, histories of mentors, sponsors and artists generate over/interpretations in the form of…[Read more]

Review for The Seventeenth Century of Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro, _The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Changed the World_ and Marco Barducci, _Hugo Grotius and the Century of Revolution, 1613-1718_