This essay draws on cognitive literary theory to offer new ways of reading Cao Xueqin’s classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢) aka The Story of the Stone.

This essay intervenes in current ecocritical debates about the relationship between fiction and environmental risk by analyzing the limits of risk theory in the deep time of the Anthropocene. Although contemporary ecocriticism argues that we must move from apocalyptic depictions of risk to realistic ones, this essay examines fictions of nuclear…[Read more]

This course considers literary experiment instigated by the Internet and exercised on both analogue and digital platforms. When we think of “hacking,” we frequently think of solitary computer programmers in dark rooms. But hacking also implies a culture of profane disruption that closely mirrors developments in literary experimentation over the…[Read more]

This article analyzes the connections between Lorde’s representations of blindness in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and its connection to lesbian sexuality.

Feminist resistance has been crucial for Argentina’s recovery from the military dictatorship of 1976-1983. Alicia Partnoy was “disappeared” into one of hundreds of torture centers sardonically called “Little Schools.” After her release and exile to the United States, she published her poetic testimony, The Little School, with Cleis Press in 1986.…[Read more]

From the twelfth century to the seventeenth, political prophecy was prominent among English literary genres no less than in English political life. Derived from Welsh poetic tradition via Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin History of the Kings of Britain, prophecy reached all social classes. Prophetic texts influenced the decisions of kings, shaped p…[Read more]

The idea that the US media is biased against organized labor may seem too obvious to require comment and research, but the details are quite important to understanding to to communicate more effectively between voices of the labor community and voices of management. The common assumption that labor media coverage became more skewed with the…[Read more]

Can we entertain the idea that The Taming of the Shrew can be performed and received as comedy in the post-Women’s March US? If so, would the laughter be empathetic and solidary rather than callous? The answer lies in physical theater which is uniquely poised to activate elements of farce in the play. Shrew is one of the Shakespearean comedies t…[Read more]

Early works of dramatic criticism seeking to draw parallels between ritual and drama in Africa concentrated on examining the dramatic characteristics of ritual to see how drama evolved from ritual. However, a closer application of the theories of Girard, Schechner, Smith, Hubert Mauss and Turner reveal new perspectives on the interaction between…[Read more]

A contribution to Transition’s “I Can’t Breathe” forum, an online space for responses to the murders of unarmed black Americans by police. My piece, which was chosen for publication in the print edition of the magazine, reflected upon the similarities between the death of Eric Garner in New York City and the death of an enslaved sugar refiner nam…[Read more]

The Stage 3 revision sets up the Theory Palette with hues and tones of green (author, history, and nature), yellow (culture), purple (psyche), grey (text), red (reader), dark blue (literature), light blue (language), rose (embodiment/perception), and hot pink (intersectional feminisms).

Airbrush and pencil tools suggest color blending without…[Read more]

The first international journal of comparative literary studies, entitled Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum (1877-1888), was published in Kolozsvár/Cluj/Klausenburg (in former Hungary, today in Romania). The research on the pioneering multilingual journal usually foregrounds only one of the editors, Hugo von Meltzl, the young university…[Read more]

A clean copy of the Theory Palette http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6581T, this (almost) blank canvas is open to artistic and textual interventions, variations, and compositions with the intersecting concerns of author, history, culture, psyche, text, reader, literature, language, and embodiment/perception as blendable paint colors.

This Theory Palette revision layers in 12 theoretical approaches; it also problematizes the perceiving-subject through a stylized human palette. The thought and speech bubbles gesture toward the problems of apperception and expression after René Magritte’s “Le fils de l’homme” (The Son of Man 1928-29) and “La Trahison des Images” (The Treachery…[Read more]

Evoking the creative messiness of an artist’s palette, this Theory Palette depicts nine theoretical concerns as intersecting, blendable paint colors: author, history, culture, psyche, text, reader, literature, language, and embodiment/perception. Just as painters in the same school, theorists blend colors to create their own compositions, s…[Read more]

Desde el período del Dadá se han ido borrando los límites entre las formas artísticas y sus soportes, entre las estéticas de uso y las estéticas formales, entre los espacios altos y bajos de producción cultural, y también, entre la percepción de centros y periferias que parecen haberse astillado y reproducido a la interioridad de espacios hasta ha…[Read more]

This paper addresses the performance of Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna undertaken by TNT-El Vacie (Territorio de Nuevos Tiempos), a theater company from Seville, Spain. I Consider how Antonio Álamo’s adaptation, Pepa Gamboa’s direction, and the staging of El Vacie, a company comprised exclusively of non-professional Roma women, constitutes a site o…[Read more]