Art Spiegelman is one of the most-discussed creators in Comic Book Studies. His Pulitzer-winning work Maus (1980 and 1991) was, alongside The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Watchmen (1987), the catalyst to a sea change in the commercial and critical fortunes of the alternative comic book during the mid-1980s. It has been a landmark text in…[Read more]

This paper examines Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (2007) in the context of Holocaust literature and historiography. It begins with an introduction to the genre of Holocaust literature and the problematic nature of ‘survivor’ testimony. Michaels’ work is then contextualized within this body of literature. The essay goes on to examine the means t…[Read more]

This presentation explored the implications of constraints on due process and academic freedom in light of contingent faculty hiring.

Blog on writing about writing sessions from MLA 2016

Blog on writing about writing sessions from MLA 2016

I argue that The Elements of Style by Strunk and White comes out of a history connecting it to the nineteenth century “conversation handbook” (Connors) and other cultural guides to middlebrow identity formation including The Book-Of-The-Month Club. The Elements of Style is a guide to a genteel language performance rooted in the racialized,…[Read more]

I argue that The Elements of Style by Strunk and White comes out of a history connecting it to the nineteenth century “conversation handbook” (Connors) and other cultural guides to middlebrow identity formation including The Book-Of-The-Month Club. The Elements of Style is a guide to a genteel language performance rooted in the racialized,…[Read more]

I argue that The Elements of Style by Strunk and White comes out of a history connecting it to the nineteenth century “conversation handbook” (Connors) and other cultural guides to middlebrow identity formation including The Book-Of-The-Month Club. The Elements of Style is a guide to a genteel language performance rooted in the racialized,…[Read more]

In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the article:

Born in 1976 in Bermuda, Jon McGregor grew up in Norfolk and currently lives in Nottingham in the UK. McGregor came to literary prominence with the publication of his first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (Bloomsbury, 2002). The novel was an immediate success and at just…[Read more]

In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the article: In a recent discussion of modernism, Peter Osborne argues that the terms “modern,” “modernity,” and “modernization” need to be understood through their shared philosophical status as temporal constructions. The emergence of the modern within Western philosophy is predicated on a subjec…[Read more]

In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the article:

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of communism in the former Soviet bloc, the concept of utopia was blighted with the stigma of Stalinist totalitarianism. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s despotism at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 195…[Read more]

Using Geertz’s Verstehen/ Einfühlen distinction, this essay begins with an overview of the travel writing and anthropological work about Oman, concentrating on the southern region of Dhofar. The author then situates Wilfred Thesiger’s classic Arabian Sands (1959) within these two genres as an example of a writer who is able to show unde…[Read more]