Late medieval culture tends to value pain highly and positively. Accordingly, much medievalist scholarship links pain with fear and emphasizes their usefulness in the period’s philosophy, literature, visual art, and drama. Yet, key moments in The York Play of the Crucifixion, The Second Shepherds’ Play, and The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge tro…[Read more]

Offering a reading of Mongane Wally Serote’s Revelations (2010) alongside other recent novels by black South African writers, this essay answers calls for more careful analyses of the roles that race plays within post-apartheid literature and culture. As it questions the shift away from a concern with institutional racism and white supremacy t…[Read more]

This paper argues that contemporary understandings of cosmopolitan literature are significantly limited by their dependence on sympathetic attachments as constitutive of cosmopolitan practice. I trace a genealogy of the connection between sympathy, cosmopolitanism, and the novel that extends from Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant to Martha Nussbaum and…[Read more]

This article examines the centrality of hunger and food in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying, The Heart of Redness, and The Whale Caller. While Mda’s work has been the subject of incisive readings of the politics of development in contemporary South Africa, attention to his treatment of hunger, specifically, helps to clarify the centrality of gender to…[Read more]

This essay examines scenes portrayingcare for the aging, ill, and dying across J.M. Coetzee’s fiction. Even as Coetzee’s work models an ideal of hospice that resonates with Derrida’s conception of unconditional hospitality, it also attends to how this ideal is constrained by a global neoliberal regime that conceives of dying as a crisis to be ma…[Read more]

Current debates about Afropolitan literature alternately value it for challenging western stereotypes about Africa and critique it for embracing western capitalism. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) complicates these debates by articulating a Nigerian dream that, while imbued with the class mobility of its American counterpart, d…[Read more]

The first section of David Mitchell’s genre-bending novel, Cloud Atlas (2004), purports to be set in 1850. Narrative clues approximately date the intra-diegetic diary object of this chapter to the period 1851–1910. This article argues for the construction of a stylistic historical imaginary of this period’s language that is not based on mimet…[Read more]

Nicholas of Cusa’s _De visione Dei sive de Icona_ (1453), in addition to its contribution to the question of the vision of God, engages with numerous debates concerning visibility in general, and thus addresses the dimensions of phenomenality–namely, questions concerning the icon as a type of phenomenon, the reversal of vision into a…[Read more]

Nicholas of Cusa’s _De visione Dei sive de Icona_ (1453), in addition to its contribution to the question of the vision of God, engages with numerous debates concerning visibility in general, and thus addresses the dimensions of phenomenality–namely, questions concerning the icon as a type of phenomenon, the reversal of vision into a…[Read more]

Nicholas of Cusa’s _De visione Dei sive de Icona_ (1453), in addition to its contribution to the question of the vision of God, engages with numerous debates concerning visibility in general, and thus addresses the dimensions of phenomenality–namely, questions concerning the icon as a type of phenomenon, the reversal of vision into a…[Read more]

This essay reads Ivan Efremov’s “Andromeda Nebula” (1957), Stanisław Lem’s “Solaris” (1961), and Angela and Karlheinz Steinmüller’s “Andymon” (1982) in order to explore the relationship between biological evolution and dialectical materialism, as it was negotiated through the trope of the alien in the context of the cultural politics of Eastern E…[Read more]

This essay reads Ivan Efremov’s “Andromeda Nebula” (1957), Stanisław Lem’s “Solaris” (1961), and Angela and Karlheinz Steinmüller’s “Andymon” (1982) in order to explore the relationship between biological evolution and dialectical materialism, as it was negotiated through the trope of the alien in the context of the cultural politics of Eastern E…[Read more]

The Romanian political scene at the end of 1989 calls for a critical rhetorical perspective to understand how totalitarian politics clash with revolutionary changes and how communist space, so ambitiously crafted to cover an entire country’s public sphere, influences, if at all, a free(d) discourse on national unity. Examining official discourse o…[Read more]

The article examines the Romanian and American reception of Cristian Mungiu’s 4 weeks, 3 months, 2 weeks (2007), arguing that the film’s representational minimalism indirectly caused an excess of interpretation across cultural contexts. This overinterpretation was possible because the film’s aesthetic minimalism encouraged viewers to decode the s…[Read more]

Call for Papers for Peer-Reviewed Edited Volume

Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean:
Essays in Anglophone Literature, Arts, and Culture

Co-edited by yasser elhariry, Isabelle Keller-Privat & Edwige Tamalet Talbayev

Durrell subverts the colonial mindset that allows him to define and delineate a foreign landscape for foreign readers, while nonetheless engaging in an attempt at reconciliation—a pilgrimage—between his various adopted ‘homes.’ Focusing on “Oil for the Saint,” I argue that a close examination of the physical landscape of Corfu shows that Durrel…[Read more]