Kafka’s Romanticism/Platonism is hidden underneath the covers. In this article I show how better translations can help the reader take the covers off the bed. Whether it be K.’s meeting with Buergel in the Castle or with the Josef K.’s meeting with the Priest in The Trial,
essentially the message resonates. A preview of ESSENTIAL KAFKA.

A semiotic analysis of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

A semiotic analysis of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

This article reads South African science-fiction writer Lauren Beukes’s first novel, Moxyland (2008) set in a futuristic Cape Town, from the perspective of Lindsay Bremner’s notion of “citiness”– or how cities produce the modernity of the subjects who inhabit them. The novel is remarkable for its dependence on the social geography of the South A…[Read more]

At the height of their popularity, performing animals appeared in over half of all big-time vaudeville bills and were highly significant to its business model. They were booked to draw children and their mothers to matinee performances and, as consistent sources of novelty, to create crucial word-of-mouth interest in the bill’s weekly line-up. V…[Read more]

The article enacts the essay as the mainstay of scholarly discourse in a knowledgeable community. It deals with (con)textualized readings of poetry (or literature) mainly through the medium of translation as an important intercultural phenomenon involving poetics, episteme, borders.

Designed as a short introduction to academic literary studies of affect, Reading Affect in Literary Studies is a one-credit graduate seminar, offered in Spring 2014, that was framed by the question of how we might rethink our practice as scholars of literature to take our scholarship to publics beyond the academy. Readings included work by Rita…[Read more]

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]

Although the question of the role of empathy in our experience of fiction is currently an active one in psychology, most of the relevant research has been conducted on popular literature and film. This dissertation seeks to change that by using cognitive approaches to literature to examine how and why postmodern texts disrupt the reader or…[Read more]

Blind’s autonomous cosmopolitanism is in four distinct layers. The first layer is her unusual everyday family background in the transition from Jewish tradition to the life of European revolutionaries in the 1840s and exile in Britain. The second layer is Blind’s mental and moral development under Friederike’s care and educational guidance accor…[Read more]