Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” is known for its seductive writing despite its destructive subject matter. How does this novel accomplish such a juxtaposition? How does the novel keep the reader interested despite Humber blatantly attacking Dolores Haze? This essay explores critically explores the technical method which Nabokov uses in “Lolita.” The…[Read more]

Prior to the advent of the printing press, the page—the medieval manuscript page—was often complexly multimodal, containing elaborate scripts, rubrications, and illuminations; the medieval page was a multimedia experience for its community of readers, viewers, and listeners. Both writing and the page are, and always were, visual: rendered in mul…[Read more]

A book review of The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017) by John Dourish

The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorize the relationship between literature and society in the late-colonial era. He used the genre’s brevity to compress his portrayals of well-known female types—such as widows, prostitutes, and goodwives—into singular emotional events. This enabled Pudumaippittan to evoke…[Read more]

The influential Tamil writer Pudumaippittan turned to the short story to theorize the relationship between literature and society in the late-colonial era. He used the genre’s brevity to compress his portrayals of well-known female types—such as widows, prostitutes, and goodwives—into singular emotional events. This enabled Pudumaippittan to evoke…[Read more]

Article My reply to Jacob Sanders’ (Communication Associate of WalletHub 818 18th Street NW Suite 1020 Washington ,DC 20005) “Media Inquiry on “Most & Least Diverse States in America”

Shakespeare scholarship has long been interested in the temporal dynamics of The Winter’s Tale, and has often turned to melancholic or traumatic time frames to explain the thematic persistence of lost time in Shakespeare’s romance. In this chapter, I argue that dance provides a key interpretive framework for understanding the play’s interest in bo…[Read more]

Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) is one of the most significant texts in the history of the freedom of the press, and yet the pamphlet’s clandestine printers have successfully eluded identification for over 375 years. By examining distinctive and dam-aged type pieces from 100 pamphlets from the 1640s, this article att…[Read more]

In his essay “The Poet,” Emerson called for the poet who would sing the burgeoning nation of the United States of America. The answer to his request far exceeded all his expectations in the form of a ground-breaking volume of poems where Walt Whitman sang not only a nation, but the people who inhabited it as the people incarnated the values, str…[Read more]

Previous studies suggest that narrative fiction promotes social justice by increasing empathy, but critics have argued that the partiality of empathy severely limits its effectiveness as an engine of social justice, and that what needs to be developed is universal compassion rather than empathy. We created Compassion-Cultivating Pedagogy (CCP) to…[Read more]

Previous studies suggest that narrative fiction promotes social justice by increasing empathy, but critics have argued that the partiality of empathy severely limits its effectiveness as an engine of social justice, and that what needs to be developed is universal compassion rather than empathy. We created Compassion-Cultivating Pedagogy (CCP) to…[Read more]