The essay reads Ralph Waldo Emerson’s argument for a “nation of friends,” in “Politics,” as Emerson’s response to his lament, also in “Politics,” that the “power of love, as the basis of the State, has never been tried.” By a careful reading of that essay, which includes locating “Politics” within the debate in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan be…[Read more]

Adam Smith closes the first chapter to Theory of Moral Sentiments, ‘Of Sympathy’, with a harmless enough assertion: ‘We sympathize even with the dead’. Death is not a topic that much interests Smith in Theory of Moral Sentiments. With the exception of a few miscellaneous thoughts in the text, the one paragraph Smith devotes to it is the extent of…[Read more]

The present essay will explore legal areas of Giambattista Vico’s thought from a rhetorical and literary perspective. In particular, the essay will focus on the idea of «person» as it is investigated in De uno and New Science. The euristic quality of the notion of fictio iuris will be identified as generative core of the imaginative universal the…[Read more]

This paper traces the origins of Chicana-centered figures and tropes found in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God to early 20th century cuentos recorded in the New Mexico Federal Writer’s Project.

This paper questions how Wolfgang’s Schivelbusch’s seminal study of railway networks in 19th-century should lead us to think differently about trains and transportation within steampunk. The paper considers how both the railway and steampunk annihilate space and time; act as transportation networks; and foreground reading practices, or the lack…[Read more]

Gay black representations of the phallus subvert recognizable images of the gay/black phallus, and they draw on a tradition, however brief, of writers who have also possessed and spoken from the gay/black phallus. In thus circumventing symbolic castration,
Saint’s progeny effectively engage in a tentative yet decidedly agentive elaboration of gay…[Read more]

For the narrator of Invisible Man, the abjection of women and homosexuals operates at first as a discursive strategy for making the black male’s position more subjectively endurable, but the narrator must eventually confront this discursive strategy as an illusion of hetero-phallic agency, since he continually fails to acquire the sorts of i…[Read more]