This course focuses on developing skills of close reading and literary analysis, both in class discussion and in assignments, through the study of major black writers. This section will be a study of global black literature—novels, drama, and poetry—written in English from the twentieth century to the present. We will consider how major aut…[Read more]

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]

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American literature and Modernism, but limited access to its various publication states has meant that the 1930 edition superseded all others.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]

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]

This article focuses on the limits of liberal discourses such as multiculturalism in an increasing global world. I focus on multicultural London and juxtapose Black British writer, Zadie Smith’s novel, White Teeth to Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things, to underline the multiple intersections between the status of colored immigrants, their des…[Read more]

This essay maps out a six-year literary transformation of Paris noir from 1957 to 1963 that overlaps with the Algerian war for independence from France (1954–1962). In this journey that transits from Parisian utopianism to postcolonial criticism, from Richard Wright and James Baldwin’s love songs to racially liberal Paris to William Gardner S…[Read more]

Draft work (notes and bibliography not included) from one of my books in progress tentatively titled Against the Cultural Singularity: Digital Humanities & Critical Infrastructure Studies. Excerpted are a few portions from the beginning of the manuscript that bear on the critical potential of the digital humanities and critique.

Literary scholars’ conversations about distant reading have spent too much time pitting it against close reading, and not enough time understanding connections to other disciplines. Distant reading is better understood as part of a methodological shift that has permitted humanists and social scientists to build stronger interdisciplinary connections.

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.

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]

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]

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]

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]

A reflection on the state of the archive in the state of post-theory.