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

Would you like to get better at mindreading (i.e., at inferring people’s beliefs, desires, and intentions, based on their behavior)? As it turns out, all you would have to do is lower your relative social status. Studies have shown that people in weaker social positions engage in more active and perceptive mindreading than do people in stronger s…[Read more]

From Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Friendship” to Jacques Derrida’s rearticulation of the former in The Politics of Friendship, scholars both early modern and modern have sought ways to address the fluid co-mixture of bodies from which the discourse of friendship can and does emerge. More recently still, new materialist thinkers of ontolog…[Read more]

A reading of Shakespeare and Deleuze on the subject of Anthropocene air. Keywords: endurance, climate change, fossil capitalism, carbon ghosts, Hamlet.

This book is the first full-length monograph to bring a range of computational methods to bear in a sustained fashion, on a single novel, at the micro-level. While most contemporary digital studies are interested in distant-reading paradigms for large-scale literary history – using their digital methods as a telescope – following calls by Alan Liu…[Read more]

Traditionally read as a poem about laboring subjects who gain power through abstract and abstracting forms of bodily discipline, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) more compellingly foregrounds the erotics of the Garden as a space where humans and nonhumans intra-act materially and sexually. Following Christopher Hill, who long ago pointed t…[Read more]

Turning to Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana (1596) and The History of the World (1614), I reframe such biopolitical factors as Ralegh’s “dissability” around a concept that has less to do with human world-making and more to do with the “states of exception” (Giorgio Agamben) under which inhuman agencies come to matter for world history (of…[Read more]

Though the verbal icon has a long and robust multisensory history extending beyond Milton, my goal here is to challenge ableist readings of Milton’s poetry by linking his poetic ekphrasis to the politics and aesthetics of disability.

This essay offers a critique of the vitalist turn in queer and ecological theory, here represented by the work of Karen Barad. Whereas Barad advances an image of life geared towards meaningful connection with others, human and nonhuman, Deleuze advances an a-signifying ontology of self-dismissal. The point of this essay isn’t to separate their t…[Read more]

In early 1918, the Bolshevik-dominated Third Congress of Soviets declared the formation of a new composite polity—the Soviet Russian Republic. The congress’s resolutions, however, simultaneously proclaimed a federation of national republics and a federation of soviets. The latter seemed to recognize regionalism and localism as organizing pri…[Read more]

Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan: both are futurologists who theorized about the impact of information exchange on societies. In the late 1960s, Toffler came up with the concept of future shock, while McLuhan “invented” the global village. I dared combining these two concepts into a sort of “theory of everything” to explain political process…[Read more]

Book review. Kate Langdon & Vladimir Tismaneanu “Putin’s Totalitarian Democracy: Ideology, Myth, and Violence in the Twenty-First Century”, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

This essay argues that the tension in Coetzee’s reading of Robinson Crusoe springs from the exposure of the Christian secret in both the colonial enterprises of the characters and the authorial presences of Defoe and Coetzee. My argument draws on Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death, which outlines how Christianity tacitly incorporates (but doe…[Read more]

Call for Proposals

Media, Lingualisms, Translations: Technologies of Language and Power

Conference to be held November 13-14, 2020; hosted by the School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State University, Tempe.

Keynote speakers: Jean-Noël Robert (Collège de France, Paris)
Lourdes Ortega (Georgetown University, W…[Read more]

This course is a study of Latinx literatures and cultures produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will concentrate our attention on works by Chicanos, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Dominican Americans. We will consider how these works represent and participate in the upheavals that characterize the…[Read more]

If we look at the past three decades in the history of Eastern Europe, Ukraine may safely be placed at the top of the chart of “unstable” states. First was the student-led Revolution on Granite in the 1990s. The outcome of that revolution was a resignation of entrenched high-ranked Soviet officials under the pressure of public opinion. Then, if…[Read more]

This article traces the breadfruit tree’s strange career as an eighteenth-century superfood, its journey from the Pacific world to the Caribbean islands, and the rhetorical practices, epistemological slippages, and linguistic permutations that undergirded these developments. Comparing indigenous, Spanish, English, Dutch, French, and US-American d…[Read more]

Book review. Taras Kuzio “Putin’s War against Ukraine: Revolution, nationalism and crime,” CreateSpace Independent, in association with the Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Toronto, 2017