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.

What is the relevance of Bruno Latour’s work for literary studies?

How might ANT help us rethink questions of comparison and translation?

Exploration of how Elizabeth Gaskell uses her textual creation, “Cranford,” to insert a male “bomb” into specifically delineated memories of her pre-adult life, thereby effecting displaced matricide.

Analysis of how Jo creates her own femininity, apart from her mother’s, through effectively earning the trust and interest of increasingly impressive paternal imagos.

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]

Exploration of how Aphra Behn uses her textual creation “Oronnoko” to engage in a guiltless sexual affair that bypasses all societal and inner-psychic censors.

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

This is the Introduction to Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention (Edinburgh UP, October 2018), which argues that the rural areas of Britain were impacted by modernisation just as much – if not more – than urban and suburban areas. It is the first study of modernity and modernism to focus on rural people and places that experienced…[Read more]

Drawing on research in developmental psychology, rhetorical narratology, and cultural history, as well as on digital data mining, this essay seeks to broaden the interdisciplinary and interpretive range of cognitive literary studies.

In light of (re)new(ed) interest in focusing interdisciplinary scholarly attention on the history of capitalism – a focus captured in Edward Baptist’s recent book, The Half has Never Been Told – this essay reads Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy as a key text for considering the history of capitalism as central to conceptions of circum-…[Read more]

Short paper presented for MLA 2019 Session 417 – “Critical Computation: What’s Next?”

“Notre-Dame in Jean Fouquet’s Hours of Etienne Chevalier, ca. 1452-52” is a book excerpt of May Spangler’s “Paris in Architecture, Literature and Art,” recently published at Peter Lang. Designed for an interdisciplinary course in Cultural Studies, the book capitalizes on the little exposure liberal arts students have to architecture, and the wid…[Read more]

La poesia dell’inverno (del letargo, dice Proust) è materia della Recherche che coniuga arte e vita, o piuttosto impasta i materiali della vita, per farne arte. In un passo del Côté de Guermantes l’eroe del romanzo si trova a trascorrere una notte nella guarnigione di Doncière. L’associazione di diverse sensazioni fisiche (il freddo, la luminosit…[Read more]

Review of the recent book of Anne Simon, about Proust and / with philosophers