This book brings the pre-Columbian and colonial history of Latin America home: rather than starting out in Spain and following Columbus and the conquistadores as they “discover” New World peoples, The Formation of Latin American Nations begins with the Mesoamerican and South American nations as they were before the advent of European col…[Read more]

Argues that J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” is an adventure in reverse, an “argument” for “your” regression. Rather than play with your ability to maybe succeed in threatening environments, it confirms your worst suspicions about yourself, lending you in mood to cling to others in a master-slave relationship, so long as they’ll agree to…[Read more]

Delineates how much of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Fellowship of the Ring” is about preparing Frodo especially so that if caught out alone, he’d never dare venture a decent listen to anyone who might attempt to sway him to consider the due fate for the Ring, other than according to Gandalf’s specifications. Positions the text as one that bates the reader…[Read more]

Explores Douglas Coupland’s “Generation X” as almost a Gen Xer’s “version of John Updike’s Couples”; that is, as, a place where, like Updike’s book, friends create a community isolated only to themselves. Though unlike Updike’s work, where — considering the time it was written in, the ’70s, where a generation succeeded in overtly contesting and…[Read more]

Exploring several key scholarly explorations on the culture of sensibility in the British 18th-century, this article draws attention to what the current manner of accessing the people who invoked and participated in it are deemed to have been like, and to how this has exposed them to being invested in protecting people of, ostensibly actually,…[Read more]

Explores how Max Vigne, from Andrea Barrett’s “Servants of the Map,” makes use of the dangerous Himalayan mountain environment as almost as Winnicottian “play space,” in which to recover from being requited to a life of obligation, rather than real-self discovery, after his mother’s death.

Explores the invisible man, in Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man,” as borrowing upon associations of patriarchal maleness, in the sense Ann Douglas in her “Terrible Honesty” argues 20s modern’s did, to secure freedom from feelings of entrapment by maternal figures, whose near-proximity to him is expressed in the text as often incestuous, gross;…[Read more]

Discussing the concept of cultural trauma and its role in popular television dramas such as 24 (FOX 2001-10, 2014-), Battlestar Galactica (Syfy 2004-9), Rubicon (AMC 2010) and Person of Interest (CBS 2011-16), this paper sets out to identify three distinct clusters that are part of what Newcomb and Hirsch once termed a “cultural forum”—a discu…[Read more]

This is the Introduction to my new book, _Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History_.

A review of Stanley Kunitz’s poetry, emphasizing how he used his poetry to both explore and manage his relationship with his dominating mother. Argues that none of Kunitz’s elegies work as conventional elegies, or as we traditionally understand or expect them to work, but more as working their way to the direction Peter Sacks advocates, as…[Read more]

Explores how Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” encourages, more than identification with, but an impressing oneself within “the kid,” and makes all of his adventures with Glanton and his outriders a ride we thrill at, even if at times very much secretly — as with the slaughter of the indigenous camp. Glanton is a phallic “hero” for us; it is the…[Read more]

Explores how Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” encourages, more than identification with, but an impressing oneself within “the kid,” and makes all of his adventures with Glanton and his outriders a ride we thrill at, even if at times very much secretly — as with the slaughter of the indigenous camp. Glanton is a phallic “hero” for us; it is the…[Read more]

Explores how Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” encourages, more than identification with, but an impressing oneself within “the kid,” and makes all of his adventures with Glanton and his outriders a ride we thrill at, even if at times very much secretly — as with the slaughter of the indigenous camp. Glanton is a phallic “hero” for us; it is the…[Read more]

Explores how Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” encourages, more than identification with, but an impressing oneself within “the kid,” and makes all of his adventures with Glanton and his outriders a ride we thrill at, even if at times very much secretly — as with the slaughter of the indigenous camp. Glanton is a phallic “hero” for us; it is the…[Read more]

Exemplaria review essay by Sarah Elliott Novacich of recent books by Simon Gaunt, Jonathan Hsy, and Shirin Khanmohamadi on medieval contact zones.

Personal perspective on the current state of open access and publishing practices in the fields of Television and Media Studies, and pointers to a variety of scholar-led initiatives and options of where scholars can actually publish open access in their field without the payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs).

Explores a passage of Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves.” Delineates how Carter makes play with such things as the dialogue between the subconsciously experienced meanings of actual words ostensibly serving as only overt alphabetic components within words, to dramatize the fitfulness of the protagonist’s emergence at the finish of the story…[Read more]

Explores a passage of Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves.” Delineates how Carter makes play with such things as the dialogue between the subconsciously experienced meanings of actual words ostensibly serving as only overt alphabetic components within words, to dramatize the fitfulness of the protagonist’s emergence at the finish of the story…[Read more]

Explores a clip of “Blade Runner” as if it were an artifice for suggesting means by which we might find meaning, purpose, in our own world. Decker as extension of ourselves, experimenting, failing… but ultimately succeeding, to discover purpose that is palpable to many of us, in a world we find actively seeking to degrade the possibility of it.

Argues that the way in which Marlow is presented, ensures that Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” is vulnerable as a text that ostensibly helps justify the maintenance of separate spheres between men and women; argues that Marlow’s successful agency is more about his being craftily evasive, a man who doesn’t impose but dodges.