The “Schoolhouse Gothic” represents teachers, students, and academic institutions using Gothic tropes such as the monster, the curse, and the trap. Joyce Carol Oates’s 2013 novel The Accursed both exemplifies and deviates from this tradition. Like other Schoolhouse Gothic works, The Accursed portrays the university as a place of mystified power…[Read more]

The Gothic metafiction of Stephen King and Bret Easton Ellis focuses on author-protagonists who fear what they create because their creations are re-creations, projections of their creator’s anxieties, some conventionally Gothic (the multiple/split self) and others specific to postmodern conceptions of subjectivity in general and authorship in p…[Read more]

To review the history of the Gothic as a counter-Enlightenment discourse, albeit an ambivalent one, is to see the suitability, if not the inevitability, of the Gothic treatment of education and educators. Presumably benign institutions, schools may seem more like unfeeling bureaucracies, brainwashing factories, militaristic zones, or lawless waste…[Read more]

To review the history of the Gothic as a counter-Enlightenment discourse is to see the suitability, if not the inevitability, of the Gothic treatment of education and educators. Schools and schoolteachers are keepers and transmitters of enlightenment. At the same time, schools and teachers are figures of power. They decide when children work, when…[Read more]

Literary Gothic emerged in the eighteenth century, the so-called Age of Reason, and takes as its subject the enemies of reason: superstition, madness, barbarism, taboo, etc. In the Gothic, these adversaries are engaged and often defeated. At the same time, however, the Gothic is a claustrophobic, paranoid literature, both profoundly skeptical of…[Read more]

The X-Files may be one of the most popular forms of historiographic metafiction, as Linda Hutcheon defines the term, ever produced. The show is, among other things, an extended meditation on the inescapability and elusiveness of history, both personal and public. At the center of the show is Fox Mulder’s personal history—his obsession with the mem…[Read more]

This essay examines the blend of male and female Gothic conventions in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain

Proponho a análise do filme O mundo (2004), de Jia Zhangke, como alegoria aberta da globalização. A noção de alegoria aberta, ou abertura alegórica, possibilita abordar a globalização como condição de possibilidade do filme (que decorre, em parte, da participação da China nos circuitos globais de capital e de comércio) e como horizonte de…[Read more]

Com base na hipótese de que a emergência histórica dos cinemas africanos e sua contemporaneidade são indissociáveis de uma reivindicação do direito de olhar, de narrar e de imaginar o mundo, este artigo busca estabelecer um quadro conceitual para uma história das formas de imaginação do comum nos cinemas africanos. Nessa história ainda a escrever…[Read more]

Discussion about the relation of Juan Muñoz works, Volker Schlöndorff film “The Drummer boy” and Günter Grass novel “Die Blechtrommel”.

This essay examines the portrayal of teachers, students, and schools in the fiction of Stephen King.

The central topic of João Botelho’s “Um adeus português” (1986), is memory in 1980s Portuguese society. The film alternates scenes from 1973, during the colonial war in Africa, with scenes set in 1985, in rural and urban areas of Portugal. In the present essay, I argue that the film enacts the need for a conversation among the Portuguese by opti…[Read more]

Entry for “The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism” on Senagelese filmmaker and writer Ousmane Sembène.

Review of American Road Narratives: Reimagining Mobility in Literature and Film by Ann Brigham (University of Virginia Press, 2015)

Digital technology is enabling a reconceptualization of film and cinema. The pliability of digital media opens up, particularly, the theory and practice of montage to revision. This pliability allows for cheap and easy copying and combining of images, and, relatedly, the transition from film frame to digital screen provides a less precious and…[Read more]

The article examines how the depiction of American suburbia in motion pictures illustrates the physical, cultural, and demographic changes in modern suburban society. Particular attention is paid to the portrayal of the suburban landscape in the 1999 film “Office Space,” written and directed by Mike Judge. The “polymorphous” landscape of “Office…[Read more]

Examines the differences between Australian and American television and the difficulties posed by the American re-make of the Australian TV series Rake.

This article focuses on representation of Cubans in the television series Dexter, paying particular attention to episode 1.5, “Love American Style” with some brief references to other episodes. Assimilation, the American Dream, nationalism and crisis of identity are among the themes and issues that this article investigates. Border theory pro…[Read more]