“Carbon and Conferences (Again)” offers one person’s experience of trying to get to the Austin MLA conference by a means other than airplanes. It asks fellow MLA members for more collective, mindful attention to the carbon footprint of the conference generally. While acknowledging the intellectual and personal joy in face to face encounters, it…[Read more]

Mandarin nominals may appear bare or non-bare in various positions with different interpretations. Questions arise as to how Mandarin-speaking children interpret bare nominals, given that bare nominals can have various interpretations. On the other hand, how do they interpret non-bare nominals, such as demonstrative nominals? This experimental…[Read more]

Mandarin nominals may appear bare or non-bare in various positions with different interpretations. Questions arise as to how Mandarin-speaking children interpret bare nominals, given that bare nominals can have various interpretations. On the other hand, how do they interpret non-bare nominals, such as demonstrative nominals? This experimental…[Read more]

Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s attenuation of language, the French Nobel Prize laureate Gao Xingjian has conducted various language experiments in his literary creations in the past two decades. Gao’s literary works, as Diaspora literature, have received extensive attention from European readers due to their Western modernist literary style, the aut…[Read more]

In 2003, David Mitchell’s editorial contact at the US branch of Random House moved from the publisher, leaving the American edition of Cloud Atlas (2004) without an editor for approximately three months. Meanwhile, the UK edition of the manuscript was undergoing a series of editorial changes and rewrites that were never synchronised back into t…[Read more]

The purpose of this graduate course is to examine key texts of the twentieth century that established the fundamental connection between language structures and practices on the one hand, and the formation of selfhood and subjectivity, on the other. In particular, the course will focus on theories that emphasize the role of formal elements in…[Read more]

Peter Pan helps Rita solve the mystery of a stray puzzle piece. Aldo looks at the clouds and decides to quit. A little girl insists on making everything in her coloring book orange. Eve defies darkness turning past dreams into future memories.

12 Random Words / 12 Palabras al Azar is a bilingual collection of interior vignettes told in both…[Read more]

In the last six years, scholars have engaged with the effects of globalization on the study of collective memory, emphasizing the de-territorialization, de-nationalization of memory cultures. While being attentive to the global circulation and transformation of collective memories, authors in this issue seek to revisit and critique some…[Read more]

A book review of Jerome McGann’s A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

The humanities must work together with STEM if we are to succeed in articulating relevant, historically informed, and culturally nuanced responses to grand challenges.

Code switching is a practice exercised by multilingual speakers. Linguists define the term as the simultaneous use of more than one language. Code switching is prevalent in postcolonial countries in which the colonial language has continued to exist alongside the native language. In the past, code switching in the Arab world has been confined to…[Read more]