English 3386 equips students for critical encounters with the texts, images, sounds, and situations that constitute American life, politics, history, and culture. This section is organized around the theme of “Versioning Digital Humanities.” Many texts go through various “versions” as they are revised for republications, corrected for new edition…[Read more]

discussion of the may 2004 issue of pmla that treated science fiction as a scholarly genre. my question was, instead of writing strung-out, dystopian lit, why not ask what will be the level of consciousness of an individual human biped in a galactic economy of quadrilions and quintillions of people, each utilizing near- infinity numbers of…[Read more]

Hemingway’s In Our Time has been long recognized as a major development in American literature and Modernism, but limited access to its various publication states has meant that the 1930 edition superseded all others. This edition makes the 1923 version of “In Our Time” and “They All Made Peace—What Is Peace?” available for the first time since…[Read more]

Since its first publication, critics have recognized Hemingway’s 1924 in our time as a major development in American literature and Modernism. This edition makes the 1924 version of in our time available for the first time since the 1977 facsimile edition, which was in a print run limited to 1700 copies. The original edition was printed in only 1…[Read more]

The emergence of the digital humanities in specialized disciplines and librarianship alike necessitates a recalibration of the balance of knowledge and what Julia Flanders calls “metaknowledge.” DH in the disciplines has brought discussion of metaknowledge – data structures, archival and editorial standards, digital curation and representation -…[Read more]

Syllabus for an advanced graduate course on realism and the Victorian novel taught at Temple University in Fall 2015.

This essay explores the meanings and effects of postcolonial authors’ recent refashioning of classical historical fiction. That refashioning has two aims: a materialist cartography that counters the nationalist vocation of classical historical fiction by revealing the supra-national, global aspirations of colonial capitalism as a system; and an e…[Read more]

This syllabus delineates the readings and assignments for an advanced undergraduate course on the history and theory of the novel taught in fall 2014 at the University of Georgia.

This syllabus delineates the readings and assignments for an advanced undergraduate course on the history and theory of the novel taught in fall 2014 at the University of Georgia.

The article focuses on the restoration of the collections of paintings and drawings of E. E. Cummings in Brockport, New York. It is inferred that the Hildegarde Lasell Watson Collection has sustained a mass of damage over the last 25 years, and that efforts for its conservation have consistently been delayed. It discusses the contents and the…[Read more]

Between 1988 and 1994 American comic books engaged the politics, problematics, and crises of the AIDS epidemic by injecting the virus and its social, cultural, and epidemiological effects on gay men into the four-color fantasies of the superhero genre. As the comic-book industry was undergoing major internal changes that allowed for more mature,…[Read more]

In his introduction to Mourid Barghouti novel, I saw Ramallah, Edward Said refers to the Palestinians as a displaced and a misplaced people. Regardless of the nationalities they carry or countries they live in, they carry with them the trauma of events that led to the loss of their homeland, and the grief of this loss and endless displacement.…[Read more]

Unlike his earlier novels, J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, has not received the attention that it deserves from the critics. The novel, which is set in Russia not only draws on real aspects of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s life but also on certain events in the Russian author’s novels, specifically The Devils. Coetzee’s Dostoevsky is an aging a…[Read more]

Although Plato’s Utopia or ideal city is the non-place that holds the promise of perfection, it remains the place in which citizens are categorized by a rigid structure. José Saramago, on the other hand, introduces us to a dystopia in his novel Blindness, in which one event leads to the ruin of a city. Yet, as with Plato’s Utopia, a similar…[Read more]

This paper offers a brief consideration of the literary ballad as a register of what by the mid-’60s economists had diagnosed as “urban crisis” and in 1970 John Ashbery called “urban chaos.” I’m particularly interested in how poets used the ballad to see and see into the failures of the “spatio-temporal fix” of urban renewal. My general idea is…[Read more]

This essay demonstrates that Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake goes beyond conventional wisdom about immigrant experiences in so far as it explores how the South Asian diaspora participates in transnational connections, shaping and transforming the notion of American identity in the contemporary global era. Lahiri’s novel offers us a striking acc…[Read more]

Dreams are abstract thoughts in one’s mind that can be revealed. Thoughts that are suppressed can be revealed in the subconscious mind. Sigmund Freud views dreams as one views sleep; as an abstract code that can be decoded through actions and through the ‘slip of the tongue.’ The Freudian slip is found in several passages of A Portrait of the A…[Read more]