This is a poem about fire.

This article invites the reading of Fernando Pessoa’s Fausto as a rhizomatic work, via three different critical lenses that lead to plurality: Traditions, Transcriptions, and Translations. Regarding different Faustian traditions, instead of seeing Pessoa’s Fausto merely as a competition with Goethe (as proposed by Eduardo Lourenço in his pref…[Read more]

In this book chapter, Dr. Davis examines the depiction of a dissimulated desire for material improvement (mejora) as it is expressed in the epic poetry of imperial Spain, particularly in Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana. She shows that within the aristocratic context of the times, the desire for personal betterment or “mejora” is always contingent…[Read more]

The nautical motif of the ex-voto (votive offering) is a lyric genre that reflects poetically the possible experience of a shipwreck survivor. Paradoxically, many of the poets who evoke the perils of sea travel never left Spain or, at most, sailed only the waters of the Mediterranean. Their writing of the sea remained consistently codified in…[Read more]

In this early article, written in the wake of the publication of Alessandro Martinengo’s _La astrología en la obra de Quevedo_ (Madrid: Alhambra, 1983), Dr. Davis focuses on the astrological tropes in a Quevedo sonnet on the nativity of Christ to see whether this poetic text can shed additional light on the poet’s documented penchant for…[Read more]

Professor Davis’s early article on appropriations of the Indies by Spanish poets who remained in Spain invites us to contemplate a body of poetry that plays the idea of American treasures against the value of true, spiritual riches.

Several of Francisco de Quevedo’s hagiographic poems are puzzling because of their irreverent tone. Edward M. Wilson and Jose Manuel Blecua both noted that “la relacion entre las dos caras de un Quevedo es cuestión difícil y delicada para los modernos;” indeed, the writer’s particular blend of “las burlas con las veras” has attracted attention s…[Read more]

This essay analyzes the work of the poetic function as defined by Roman Jakobson in poems by Francisco de Quevedo that concern themselves with the trope of the rending of the rocks at the moment of Christ’s death on the cross, and in other poetic texts of Quevedo.

The pandemic has been the most vivid agent of change that many of us have known. But it has not changed everything: plenty of the institutions, norms, and practices that sustain racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and cisheteropatriarchy have either weathered the storm of the crisis or been nourished by its effects. And yet enough has changed…[Read more]

Questions of positionality permeate 21st-century poetics—and seem to come to a head around the intentional inclusion/exclusion of the reader in the speaker’s pronoun of choice, especially when the pronoun in question is “we.” This essay contrasts the fragmented lyric self of modernism with current approaches to a lyric “we” and puts three conte…[Read more]

This is a prologue to the Spanish translation of Joanna Zylinska’s The End of Man. A Feminist Counter-Apocalypse (2019).

The proliferation of work by autistic writers continues apace, defying a long and multidisciplinary tradition of constructing autistic people as lacking the capacity for narration. To study neurodivergent literature, then, is to witness the refusal of these exclusionary narrative conventions, and to register the ideological presuppositions that…[Read more]

The proliferation of work by autistic writers continues apace, defying a long and multidisciplinary tradition of constructing autistic people as lacking the capacity for narration. To study neurodivergent literature, then, is to witness the refusal of these exclusionary narrative conventions, and to register the ideological presuppositions that…[Read more]

A one-day hybrid symposium to be hosted by the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE) at the University of Brighton (UK). Date: Wednesday 5 April 2023. Location: University of Brighton, City Campus, M2, and online. Keynote speaker: Dr Leticia Sabsay (LSE). Deadline for abstracts: Friday 24 February 2023. Please see poster for…[Read more]

A one-day hybrid symposium to be hosted by the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE) at the University of Brighton (UK). Date: Wednesday 5 April 2023. Location: University of Brighton, City Campus, M2, and online. Keynote speaker: Dr Leticia Sabsay (LSE). Deadline for abstracts: Friday 24 February 2023. Please see poster for…[Read more]

Focusing on rural white communities in the early twentieth century, this article examines how disability, queerness, and economic estrangement were intertwined in American eugenic assessments of the “unfit.” In doing so, it attends to the knotty relations of power by which such communities were simultaneously adjudged deviant and bestowed with the…[Read more]

Focusing on rural white communities in the early twentieth century, this article examines how disability, queerness, and economic estrangement were intertwined in American eugenic assessments of the “unfit.” In doing so, it attends to the knotty relations of power by which such communities were simultaneously adjudged deviant and bestowed with the…[Read more]

In the current social and political turmoil, few issues are more divisive and cause more controversy than issues related to the rights of sexual minorities and gender dissidents. The polarizing impact of these issues is really astounding given the size of these two groups. Explanations for this divisiveness of LGBTQ rights focus on either the…[Read more]

It is May 2020. I am watching Kae Tempest perform Hold Your Own online. Tempest’s vocal performances are always rich in meaningful detail; from the rising semi-sung sound that embodies all the dreams and potentials of a fallible humanity to the throaty fall that
edges and softens our collapse into foolishness and self-defeat. Slipping between s…[Read more]