This article invites the reading of Fernando Pessoa’s Fausto as a rhizomatic work, via three different critical lenses that lead to plurality: Traditions, Transcriptions, and Translations. Regarding different Faustian traditions, instead of seeing Pessoa’s Fausto merely as a competition with Goethe (as proposed by Eduardo Lourenço in his pref…[Read more]

In this book chapter, Dr. Davis examines the depiction of a dissimulated desire for material improvement (mejora) as it is expressed in the epic poetry of imperial Spain, particularly in Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana. She shows that within the aristocratic context of the times, the desire for personal betterment or “mejora” is always contingent…[Read more]

The nautical motif of the ex-voto (votive offering) is a lyric genre that reflects poetically the possible experience of a shipwreck survivor. Paradoxically, many of the poets who evoke the perils of sea travel never left Spain or, at most, sailed only the waters of the Mediterranean. Their writing of the sea remained consistently codified in…[Read more]

In this early article, written in the wake of the publication of Alessandro Martinengo’s _La astrología en la obra de Quevedo_ (Madrid: Alhambra, 1983), Dr. Davis focuses on the astrological tropes in a Quevedo sonnet on the nativity of Christ to see whether this poetic text can shed additional light on the poet’s documented penchant for…[Read more]

Professor Davis’s early article on appropriations of the Indies by Spanish poets who remained in Spain invites us to contemplate a body of poetry that plays the idea of American treasures against the value of true, spiritual riches.

Several of Francisco de Quevedo’s hagiographic poems are puzzling because of their irreverent tone. Edward M. Wilson and Jose Manuel Blecua both noted that “la relacion entre las dos caras de un Quevedo es cuestión difícil y delicada para los modernos;” indeed, the writer’s particular blend of “las burlas con las veras” has attracted attention s…[Read more]

This essay analyzes the work of the poetic function as defined by Roman Jakobson in poems by Francisco de Quevedo that concern themselves with the trope of the rending of the rocks at the moment of Christ’s death on the cross, and in other poetic texts of Quevedo.

Questions of positionality permeate 21st-century poetics—and seem to come to a head around the intentional inclusion/exclusion of the reader in the speaker’s pronoun of choice, especially when the pronoun in question is “we.” This essay contrasts the fragmented lyric self of modernism with current approaches to a lyric “we” and puts three conte…[Read more]

Digital visual culture in cyberspace creates new methods for Black queer women to resist the oppression of controlling images. As cyborg beings, Black queer women perform their identities in creative and boundary-breaking ways, often using sexually explicit lyrics and dance to resist white normativity and heteronormativity. Multinational social…[Read more]

A review of three poetry collections by Obiorah Momife titled So Far Away, Eyes of the One Who Loves and Where Two Roads Meet. The three books contain some of the most pungent poems penned by any poet in contemporary Nigeria. They are witty and engaging just as they inspire the reader to take steps to change the present decadent situation that…[Read more]

A response to the decision of Wiley Global to “disappear” 1,300+ of their ebooks in the ProQuest catalog at the beginning of the Fall 2022 term without any communication to university libraries at all, thus taking libraries by surprise and indicating Wiley’s move away from libraries as repositories and lenders of their ebooks, passing on costs to…[Read more]

It is May 2020. I am watching Kae Tempest perform Hold Your Own online. Tempest’s vocal performances are always rich in meaningful detail; from the rising semi-sung sound that embodies all the dreams and potentials of a fallible humanity to the throaty fall that
edges and softens our collapse into foolishness and self-defeat. Slipping between s…[Read more]

A series of sketches written in 1924 during an ocean crossing from New York to Tilbury, “Passage to England” was published only in 1998 by the Thomas Wolfe Society and is hardly Wolfe’s most popular or most accomplished work. Nonetheless I always felt that Passage to England had something unique and idiosyncratic and that despite a certain a…[Read more]

No creo que haya mejor ocasión que este homenaje alcalaíno al maestro Alberto Blecua para vencer las reticencias y dudas del neófito que, en palabras de Márquez Villanueva, ha de pisar por vez primera los “senderos de alto riesgo” por los que camina el Libro de buen amor. Por motivo de mi admiración y reconocimiento al homenajeado, voy a dejarme…[Read more]

Persian literature used to be visibly worldly when Persian was a lingua franca in a vast space from Balkan to China. With the British colonialism in the India and the rise of nation states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Persian lost its status and became more national in various contexts. In Iran it only got worsened with sanctions,…[Read more]

Nigeria as a developing country is on the fast track to the attainment of development, or supposedly so. In this endeavour, priority is inevitably placed on science and technology as the only routes for the attainment of this dream. Such one track minded disposition is mouthed to the exclusion of other factors that contribute to the development of…[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]

The performing Arts encompass a wide range of disciplines which are invariably synonymous with creativity, thus, creativity is the hallmark of performance. For the sake of clarity, Performing Arts comprise Theatre Arts, Music, Dance and Choreography and the electronic media of Radio, Television and film commonly referred
to as the audio-visual…[Read more]

The drama of the Niger Delta region has enjoyed robust scholarship. This essay interrogates J. P. Clark-Bekederemo’s drama against the cultural milieu of the region and tries to investigate the connections between the rich folklore of the area and the wealth of poetry and imagery contained in his drama. The essay investigates the terrain,…[Read more]