It has long been acknowledged that syntactic violations in poetry are central to the difficulty of a poetic text (e.g. Fowler 1971, Fois-Kaschel 2002, Burke 2007, Thoms 2008). However, for all its merits, most of the work carried out so far tends either to be more concerned with linguistic theory than with literary effects (i.e. the generativist…[Read more]

This article maps the emergence and prevalence of the white heterosexual male psychopath in modern American commercial television through an analysis of the final three episodes of Breaking Bad (2009-2013).

This article maps the emergence and prevalence of the white heterosexual male psychopath in modern American commercial television through an analysis of the final three episodes of Breaking Bad (2009-2013).

This essay argues that greater attention to the significance of the material culture of print, especially in early African American print culture, shows how technologies of racialization emerge in conjunction with technologies of printed words and images. The stereotype is perhaps the most familiar case. In one sense it offers quick reproduction…[Read more]

This article offers an interdisciplinary perspective on Jean-Luc Godard’s video short Puissance de la parole (1988). It engages with key historical figures in film, visual art and music, positioning Godard’s video mashup as a violent intermedial space where past and future meet. Exploring techniques of fragmentation, decontextualization and rec…[Read more]

This article offers an interdisciplinary perspective on Jean-Luc Godard’s video short Puissance de la parole (1988). It engages with key historical figures in film, visual art and music, positioning Godard’s video mashup as a violent intermedial space where past and future meet. Exploring techniques of fragmentation, decontextualization and rec…[Read more]

This is a short introductory essay for _The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies_, published in 2015. The areas covered by _The Handbook_ include cognitive historicism, cognitive narratology, cognitive queer theory, neuroaesthetics, cognitive postcolonial studies, studies in emotions and empathy, decision theory, cognitive disability…[Read more]

This essay compares two mid-twentieth century poets of the Americas, Allen Ginsberg and Haroldo de Campos, in view of how their work circa 1960 intersects despite the differences in their poetics. It introduces the notion of the obversal, or the identity among poems through a common history.

In this article I examine the way Collins, in her young adult novel Mockingjay, connects historical context of an urban firebombing like those frequently seen during World War II, with the fictional presentation of a firebombing reminiscent of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five to present the horrors of war to a new generation. I then show how she m…[Read more]

Book review of Joanna Freer, Thomas Pynchon and the American Counterculture, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, £60. Pp 165; 978-1-107-07605-1.)

Archives & Networks of Modernism developed without any single authorial focus to address or collapse the plurality of Modernist and Late Modernist networks and archives. The collection instead adopts an international perspective, in particular where each network or archive intersects or interrupts the other. In this, it draws from the established…[Read more]

This piece provides a detailed engagement with Don DeLillo’s depiction of the 2003 Iraq war in his latest novel, Point Omega. Framed through both formal aesthetic signposting of the interrelations between modernist and postmodernist practice and also through explicit thematic comparison between the conflicts, I trace DeLillo’s treatment of Iraq in…[Read more]

In his article “Queering Masturbation in Lorde’s Life and Writing” Eric Sipyinyu Njeng discusses masturbation in Audre Lorde’s life and works to signal an important aspect of her oeuvre often neglected in scholarship. Lorde stands out among prominent queer queens by demonstrating theory corporeally thereby…[Read more]

This piece presents a tripartite analysis of the relationship between the philosophical works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the novels of Thomas Pynchon. This is broadly structured around three schools of Wittgenstein scholarship identified by Guy Kahane et al. as the Orthodox Tractatus, the New Wittgenstein, and several strands of the Orthodox…[Read more]

This piece explores the resonances between the depiction of the Cold War and the War Against Terror in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and Don DeLillo’s Underworld.