Giorgio Agamben defines the sacred man or Homo Sacer as one who is not worthy of sacrifice. Having lost all rights, the person is reduced to the non-human. In modern times, banishment or banning by the law occurs when a state of exception is sanctioned by a totalitarian supremacy that suspends judicial power. The state of exception does not lie…[Read more]

An introductory survey of climate fiction (a.k.a. “cli-fi”) in English. Written with an international readership in mind.

This study imagines a Sephardic archive not as a physical site that houses the artifacts, texts, and history of a nation-state or Empire, but one that allows us to access those objects (or exposes their absence) and to bring artifacts from different official archives into dialogue in a different, virtual space, thus creating an additional, but not…[Read more]

This essay is part of a collection of open access articles on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The articles are written for first-time readers of Chaucer and are designed to supplement the teaching of the Canterbury Tales, particularly in university classrooms.

My contribution is focused on the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, providing an…[Read more]

A B ST R A C T
Rob Epstein’s The Times of Harvey Milk (USA, 1984) and Gus Van Sant’s Milk (USA,
2008), the two major films that narrate the life and tragically dramatic death of gay
politician and activist Harvey Milk (1930–1978), are widely recognized as part of
the queer cinematic canon but are less often categorized as Jewish films. While…[Read more]

This essay brings together cognitive literary theory and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic imagination to illuminate the construction of social class in the eighteenth-century novel. It offers a close reading of selected passages from Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), made possible by combining Bakhtinian and cognitive poetics. It also dis…[Read more]

This presentation will introduce the HuMetricsHSS (Humane Metrics in the Humanities and Social Sciences) initiative, which aims to develop and support a values-based framework of indicators for excellence for the humanities and social science in academia and, by extension, academic libraries. This value-based evaluation paradigm uses metrics only…[Read more]

In this essay I discuss the racial formations of Alessandro de’ Medici, first duke of Florence. These formations derive from different sources: verbal descriptions, portraiture, and the material evidence of Alessandro’s remains. I examine whether a painted “description” tallies with a verbal one, considering the variety of terms used to describ…[Read more]

The Teaching Literature Book Award is an international, juried prize, awarded biennially by the faculty in the graduate programs in English at Idaho State University. This commendation discusses both the winning volume and an honorable mention.

Objective: Using the MLA International Bibliography, students will develop a presentation that demonstrates their understanding of how scholarship on a single work of literature changes over time.

This essay demonstrates how Lynch Law suspended normative criminal law and undermined constitutional amendments made after the US Civil War. Focusing on the period between Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, the essay argues that “outlawry” provides the necessary juridical concept for understanding how a tradition of popular sovereignty wor…[Read more]

A contribution to the Editors’ Forum on Queer Form, edited by Kadji Amin, Roy Pérez, and Amber Musser, for ASAP/Journal.

A review of Robert Leucht’s “Dynamiken politischer Imagination. Die deutschsprachige Utopie von Stifter bis Döblin in ihren internationalen Kontexten, 1848–1930” (2016) and Ulrich Bach’s “Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire” (2016)

Taking its departure from Norbert von Hellingrath’s interpretation of the significance of Rousseau for Friedrich Hölderlin, the following paper argues, through a close reading of the poem “Rousseau,” that Hölderlin, contra Hellingrath, conceives of his relation to Rousseau in philological rather than prophetic terms. Looking closely at the complex…[Read more]

What happens if the homo sacer kills before he can be killed? What if the dispossessed repossess what was taken from them? What if some agent declares a state of exception to the state of exception? Starting from the observation that Agamben and Butler/Athanasiou characterize bare life and the dispossessed, respectively, in terms of radical…[Read more]

This course, under the broad heading of literature and science, takes on the subject of climate change fiction (cli-fi). It was first taught at Antioch College in winter of 2017. The course included field trips to the OSU climate research center, a local nature preserve, and the College’s farm.