This is a syllabus for my fall 2015 First Year Seminar on the Arthurian legend and its literature.

[from pp. 151-52:]

“Not only do we ourselves treat fictional characters as if they were capable of a broad variety of mental states (as real people are) to make sense of the story when we first read it; not only do we casually refer to these characters’ and the author’s mental states in our subsequent discussions with students; not only do we…[Read more]

Is There Tunisian Literature? Emergent Writing and Fractal Proliferation of Minor Voices.
The article presents the Tunisian literature from the non-local perspective of the global literary market and the circulation of translated literature. The minor status of the studied phenomenon becomes obvious even when the Tunisian literature is compared…[Read more]

Proposing an alternative phraseology of “unbecoming” to accent the risky, tentative, epigenetic processes of human development.

Proposing an alternative phraseology of “unbecoming” to accent the risky, tentative, epigenetic processes of human development.

contribution to roundtable on “Becoming Human” co-sponsored by the Middle English and Chaucer forums

contribution to roundtable on “Becoming Human” co-sponsored by the Middle English and Chaucer forums

This primer in “cognitive cultural studies” explores the cultural fantasy of perfect access to mind through body. It shows that different genres and media—movies, novels, classic Chinese operas, medieval ribald tales, musicals, paintings, documentaries, stand-up comedy, and photography—have different strategies for making us think that we have ju…[Read more]

Introduction to Modernism: Evolution of an Idea, which traces the emergence and coherence of the term “modernism”, and the field of modernist studies, from the late 1800s to the present.

Read 8 January 2016 in Austin, TX, at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, session number 218, “Quantity in English Verse: Linguistic and Neuroscience-Based Challenges to the Accentual Paradigm.” This short historiographical paper was the half-time show in our roundtable—an interlude between the session’s more substantive linguis…[Read more]