This is a book about the power game currently being played out between two symbiotic cultural institutions: the university and the novel. As the number of hyper-knowledgeable literary fans grows, students and researchers in English departments waver between dismissing and harnessing voices outside the academy. Meanwhile, the role that the…[Read more]

In this brief paper, I first introduce Gwendolyn Brook’s “The Anniad,” a 43-stanza ballad at the center of her 1949 Pulitzer-prize winning collection, Annie Allen. Next, I make a case that “The Anniad” is informed by a medievalism combining Brooks’ girlhood reading and the physical environment of Bronzeville, her Chicago neighborhood. Finally, I…[Read more]

a bibliography-in-progress for cognitive literary, film, theater, and media studies

The June 1888 issue of the Phonographic World magazine presented John Pynchon, an ancestor of Thomas, as “The First American Shorthand Reporter”. While most biographical criticism to date of Thomas Pynchon has focused on the cameo appearance of a thinly veiled William Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow, we here set out further historical infor…[Read more]

An essay written for “Neuroscience and Fiction,” a special issue of SubStance guest-edited by Pierre Casso-Nogues

This article gestures to the 1930s through 1950s inter­national anarchist literary networks that ran from Paris to London and Athens, Cairo and Alexandria, Shang­hai, Oxford and Cambridge, New York and San Francisco, and finally Big Sur and Vancouver. The distribution across these nodes was intense and sustained, but this project only hints at t…[Read more]

Dickens, in his infatuation with the orphan, anticipates Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which argues against interpreting everyone’s life experience in terms of the Oedipal conflict’s family drama.

For close to two hundred years, the ideas of Shakespeare have inspired incredible work in the literature, fiction, theater, and cinema of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. From the novels of Lao She and Lin Shu to Lu Xun’s search for a Chinese “Shakespeare,” and from Feng Xiaogang’s martial arts films to labor camp memoirs, Soviet-Chinese theater,…[Read more]

The age of global Shakespeare has arrived. It is an age in which national and transnational performances become self-conscious of the contact zone they inhabit, where dramatic meanings are co-determined by linguistic cohesion and pluralism. If Jacque Derrida’s theory of translation makes all writing inherently multilingual, Shakespeare as…[Read more]

Modern Chinese fiction dealing with cultural others can be taken as a lens through which to reread the cosmopolitan theory. At stake in the debate between communitarianism and liberalism are the viability of single cultural membership and its validity. Lao She’s Self-Sacrifice (1934) and Dr. Wen (1936-1937) question the viability of global c…[Read more]

In 2003, David Mitchell’s editorial contact at the US branch of Random House moved from the publisher, leaving the American edition of Cloud Atlas (2004) without an editor for approximately three months. Meanwhile, the UK edition of the manuscript was undergoing a series of editorial changes and rewrites that were never synchronised back into t…[Read more]

At a time when Shakespeare is becoming increasingly globalized and diversified it is urgent more than ever to ask how this appropriated ‘Shakespeare’ constructs ethical value across cultural and other fault lines. Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation is the first book to address the intersection of ethics, aesthetics, authority, and authenticity.