The search for a methodology for reading world literature largely entails the development of new critical paradigms, but it has also occasioned a re-examination and rehabilitation of world literature’s historical formulations. This essay reclaims a forgotten milestone, the 1946 essay “La ‘letteratura mondiale'” by the eminent Italian philologist…[Read more]

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction
with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the
United States. Drawing on the work of many of the leading figures in postwar Italian culture,
including Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare P…[Read more]

In this essay, I argue that the post-war critical re-interpretation of Boccaccio’s oeuvre was central to the theory and practice of Italian Neorealism. What is more, I maintain that Neorealism significantly influenced Boccaccio studies, shaping critical approaches to Boccaccio for decades after 1945. Reading scholarly and critical studies of…[Read more]

This essay will examine the multiple performance texts that exist in Ivo Van Hove’s transcultural and transmedial performance event, The Roman Tragedies (which toured worldwide from 2007 to 2013) to suggest that, in today’s “spreadable” culture (to borrow from Henry Jenkins), appropriative use becomes the bridge that can unify ‘work’ and ‘event.…[Read more]

This book is the first full-length monograph to bring a range of computational methods to bear in a sustained fashion, on a single novel, at the micro-level. While most contemporary digital studies are interested in distant-reading paradigms for large-scale literary history – using their digital methods as a telescope – following calls by Alan Liu…[Read more]

Syllabus for an upper-level English seminar at SUNY Cortland | Is Google racist? Is Wikipedia sexist? In this course, we will critically reflect on the digital tools and platforms that mediate so much of our daily lives. More specifically, we will explore how digital technologies can reproduce and challenge conditions of racial, class, and gender…[Read more]

The book publishing industry is an important social, cultural, and economic institution whose records deserve to be preserved for the public good. Books.Files was an exploratory project funded in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation aimed at assessing the archival value of digital assets in the contemporary publishing industry for stakeholders…[Read more]

Numbers appear to have limited value for literary study, since our discipline is usually more concerned to explore differences of interpretation than to describe the objective features of literary works. But it may be time to re-examine the assumption that numbers are only useful for objective description. Machine learning algorithms are actually…[Read more]

This essay surveys literary criticism at the intersection of narrative theory and the Victorian novel, which often takes one of two major approaches. In the first approach, critics examine how the act of narration itself shapes and constrains Victorian narratives, whereas in the second approach, critics focus on the relationship between Victorian…[Read more]

This is the peer-reviewed submission version of the essay, which focuses on the role that digital communication platforms can play in teaching and engaging with Wallace’s work.

Introduction to Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States (Oxford UP, 2019).

If your library doesn’t already own a copy, please consider submitting a purchase request.

Full citation: Travis M. Foster, Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

This collection features pedagogical artifacts created by the participants of the 2018-2019 NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, “Textual Data and Digital Texts in the Undergraduate Classroom.” The artifacts–assignments, syllabi, sample student work, rubrics, workshops, and more–are grouped thematically in four sec…[Read more]

Call for Proposals

Media, Lingualisms, Translations: Technologies of Language and Power

Conference to be held November 13-14, 2020; hosted by the School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State University, Tempe.

Keynote speakers: Jean-Noël Robert (Collège de France, Paris)
Lourdes Ortega (Georgetown University, W…[Read more]

Since the 1960s, Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña has developed an internationally-recognized body of hybrid works that draw on poetry, painting, sculpture, installation, dance, song, and film. “Reading as Ritual Response” considers one of Vicuña’s lesser-known categories of work, the artist’s book, through which she harnesses the visual, m…[Read more]

Since the 1960s, Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña has developed an internationally-recognized body of hybrid works that draw on poetry, painting, sculpture, installation, dance, song, and film. “Reading as Ritual Response” considers one of Vicuña’s lesser-known categories of work, the artist’s book, through which she harnesses the visual, m…[Read more]

For the “Extreme Texts” special issue of Jacket2, edited by Divya Victor (2019)