In Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s As Intermitências da Morte (2005) and in Mahmoud Darwish’s epic poem Mural (2000), the authors contemplate the nothingness that accompanies death, a concern that increasingly permeates their later writings. Although ‘death’ is depicted differently, the authors fear that with death “the universe wo…[Read more]

This memorial tribute for the late Ciaran Carson (1948-2019), Irish creative writer extraordinaire, was commissioned three years ago for inclusion in a special number of “Reading Ireland” which has not yet materialised. It is now archived in and by Humanities Common on the third anniversary of his funeral rites and burial in Belfast, Northern…[Read more]

This document is a basic guide for graduate students who need to work in archives or other special libraries. The guide includes items to bring or have on hand as well as steps for planning your visit and organizing your notes.

Examines the intersection between Chan Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism during the Southern Song dynasty period (1126-1279) in China.

I’m a disability activist and musicologist with multiple sclerosis (PhD, Musicology, Cornell, 2014). I’m unaffiliated due to discrimination against my disabilities. However, I often give guest lectures, both virtually and in person. My speaking engagements help to advance diversity and representation in academia: I offer students the opportunity…[Read more]

In 2000 a Stanford professor raped me. My rape is now older than I was. (I’m still not as old as he was.) The more time passes the more I’m struck by Stanford’s apathy and fecklessness about sexual violence. I wrote a letter asking Stanford to stop compounding the abuse and to reckon with its rape culture. This letter—including the “Incomp…[Read more]

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr’s anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths…[Read more]

Dream Life of Waste: Archaeologies of the Soul in the Key of Capitalism

(Entries organized in chronological order by date of obsolescence)

In this essay we reinterpret Camus’s novel The Plague in light of the urgency of history, that with Covid 19 pandemia made us face a real pestilence, thus allowing us to read reality and fiction as even. Our rereading relativizes the traditional allegoric interpretation of critics, while at the same time it widens its perspectives. It is in fact i…[Read more]

Essay on the poetry of Emily Dickinson and her impact upon literature. This essay celebrates her global reach from within societal spheres of gender. “Emily Dickinson transformed the genre of poetry from the academic salon styled idealism to the personal poignant voice of reality from the poet’s point of view.”

Mit dem Begriff des Plagiats findet Wilhelm Raabe in “Gutmanns Reisen” eine Chiffre für seine Praxis unhintergehbarer Intertextualität. Angesichts einer durch starke Vorgänger und eine stetig anwachsende ‘Literaturgeschichte’ fraglich gewordenen Kategorie des Neuen behauptet Raabe eine paradoxe Autorschaft originärer Sekundarität, die darin best…[Read more]

Raabe schreibt eine Prosa, die er an der Verdichtung der Versdichtung bemisst und die sich die Umwendung zum Modell nimmt. Ein Text, der diesen Umstand im Zeichen der Korrektur ‘dürftiger Prose’ inszeniert und den ich daher eine Programmschrift der Prosa nenne, liegt mit “Deutscher Mondschein” vor. Auf der Textbühne der Satire werden nicht nur d…[Read more]

An innovative account that brings together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary history to examine patterns of “mindreading” in a wide range of literary works.

This essay/ article examines the provenance and the implications of a literary archive acquired by the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of Queen’s University Belfast and now fully catalogued by Brian Caraher and Emma Hegarty under the auspices of the British Academy. The state-of-the-art. fully annotated, online catalogue establishes the…[Read more]

A review article focused on phenomenological method and Christian thought in Marie-Aimée Manchon’s book _Alentour du verses: Petite phénoménologie des Mystère_ (Ad Solem, 2019).