This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring…[Read more]

Explores the invisible man, in Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man,” as borrowing upon associations of patriarchal maleness, in the sense Ann Douglas in her “Terrible Honesty” argues 20s modern’s did, to secure freedom from feelings of entrapment by maternal figures, whose near-proximity to him is expressed in the text as often incestuous, gross;…[Read more]

Discussing the concept of cultural trauma and its role in popular television dramas such as 24 (FOX 2001-10, 2014-), Battlestar Galactica (Syfy 2004-9), Rubicon (AMC 2010) and Person of Interest (CBS 2011-16), this paper sets out to identify three distinct clusters that are part of what Newcomb and Hirsch once termed a “cultural forum”—a discu…[Read more]

A review of Stanley Kunitz’s poetry, emphasizing how he used his poetry to both explore and manage his relationship with his dominating mother. Argues that none of Kunitz’s elegies work as conventional elegies, or as we traditionally understand or expect them to work, but more as working their way to the direction Peter Sacks advocates, as…[Read more]

Routledge is doing a series of literature companions. I have been requested to build a proposal for a Literature and Social Class companion text. You are most welcome to pass on this CFP to colleagues. Please see details in attached file. Questions?
Many thanks,
Gloria McMillan, Editor
Email for ideas, communications, and drafts
glomc@dakotacom.net

Explores Maureen Folan, in Martin McDonagh’s “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” as a psychological borderline, someone who is afraid to achieve a man she can have a relationship with, and so defaults to using him as simply another object she can use in warfare against a mother she is only yet capable of playing at being able to leave behind her.

Explores how Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” encourages, more than identification with, but an impressing oneself within “the kid,” and makes all of his adventures with Glanton and his outriders a ride we thrill at, even if at times very much secretly — as with the slaughter of the indigenous camp. Glanton is a phallic “hero” for us; it is the…[Read more]

Explores how Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” encourages, more than identification with, but an impressing oneself within “the kid,” and makes all of his adventures with Glanton and his outriders a ride we thrill at, even if at times very much secretly — as with the slaughter of the indigenous camp. Glanton is a phallic “hero” for us; it is the…[Read more]

In this article, through a reading of Mark Blacklock’s 2015 novel, I’m Jack, alongside the history of erasure poetry, I suggest that an apt literary-critical metaphor for reading redaction in contemporary literature comes from the term “metadata.” This article schematizes the ways in which redaction can work in literary contexts and points to the…[Read more]

Explores a particular passage of Anthony Burgess’s “Clockwork Orange,” illuminating how it shows the text draws our admiration for Alex.

Explores Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” as if it were experienced by many viewers of a particular type — SCM’s: suburban, collegiate young men — as a feeling out of how they might contrive themselves so that their future development would not place them as identifiable as losers by he-men pulp figures they’d learned early represent…[Read more]

Personal perspective on the current state of open access and publishing practices in the fields of Television and Media Studies, and pointers to a variety of scholar-led initiatives and options of where scholars can actually publish open access in their field without the payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs).

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.