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]

n his theoretical writings, as well as in the subtext of The Waste Land, Eliot expresses the idea of the organic nature of culture and its unity despite its regional diversity. This unity is represented by some formal features of The Waste Land, such as its rhythm and structure. However, cultural unity, at times also represented by the textual, is…[Read more]

Like other forms of treachery, translation can be either concealed or exposed. Though most literary translators work in the dark and some embrace invisibility as an ideal, all translations can be situated along the continuum of illusionist-anti-illusionist or domesticating-foreignizing. A variety of paratexts lay bare the devices of translation.…[Read more]

This essay concerns the significance of phenomenology in Frantz Fanon’s thought and its influence on the autobiographic and ethnographic contours of his study, Black Skin, White Masks. Of note is Fanon’s movement between metaphor and phenomenology, especially as concerns figures of the hand and the body, and how his narratological treatment of…[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]

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]

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.

In his seminar, Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida discusses how one of the essential qualities of the specter is his ability to appear incessantly. The inability to know when the specter may appear, however, not only enforces its haunting quality but also conveys a despairing sense of what Derrida refers to as empty Messianism from which emits…[Read more]

My intention is to reorient Stephen Hero’s position in Joyce’s oeuvre, viewing it not simply as a precursor to A Portrait but instead as a first attempt at the kind of expansive narrative Joyce would undertake in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. What I wish to narrate is not primarily the story of Stephen Hero’s failure, but instead the story of how J…[Read more]