The silent film era, usually defined as 1895-1927, coincided with a revival of belief in spiritualism in America. Desperate to find meaning in the deaths of the Great War and the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, the bereaved sought contact with the dead and evidence of an afterlife. Given this fascination with spiritualism, it is not surprising that the…[Read more]

The silent film era, usually defined as 1895-1927, coincided with a revival of belief in spiritualism in America. Desperate to find meaning in the deaths of the Great War and the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic, the bereaved sought contact with the dead and evidence of an afterlife. Given this fascination with spiritualism, it is not surprising that the…[Read more]

This essay explores an unprecedented distinction between literary and popular writing that emerged in debates in Maṇikkoṭi and Āṉanta Vikaṭaṉ, two well-known Tamil magazines that were launched in the 1930s. Through short stories and critical essays, the writers who contributed to these magazines attempted to create new lenses through which to v…[Read more]

Outlines the restoration of the Russian film classic “Man with a Movie Camera” (USSR, 1929) by Dziga Vertov which was carried out by the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam between 2008 and 2010. The restoration allows contemporary audiences the possibility to once again experience Vertov’s film as the filmmaker originally intended – or at least in a v…[Read more]

Situates the composition of Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas—from manuscript notes, source material, and pilot essays to its publication as an 84-page pamphlet—within the intellectual tendencies of the Reconstruction-era American social science movement to reveal Whitman’s text as an important case study in the nascent discipline. In his pro…[Read more]

The article examines the Romanian and American reception of Cristian Mungiu’s 4 weeks, 3 months, 2 weeks (2007), arguing that the film’s representational minimalism indirectly caused an excess of interpretation across cultural contexts. This overinterpretation was possible because the film’s aesthetic minimalism encouraged viewers to decode the s…[Read more]

This article compares the 1950s and 1960s short story writing of two influential yet underexamined women writers, Mannu Bhandari (1931–) and R. Chudamani (1931–2010), who are considered key representatives of the Hindi and Tamil literary canons, respectively. Mani demonstrates that from within their specific geographic and historical contexts, Bha…[Read more]

This article compares the 1950s and 1960s short story writing of two influential yet underexamined women writers, Mannu Bhandari (1931–) and R. Chudamani (1931–2010), who are considered key representatives of the Hindi and Tamil literary canons, respectively. Mani demonstrates that from within their specific geographic and historical contexts, Bha…[Read more]

Call for Papers for Peer-Reviewed Edited Volume

Re-Membering Hospitality in the Mediterranean:
Essays in Anglophone Literature, Arts, and Culture

Co-edited by yasser elhariry, Isabelle Keller-Privat & Edwige Tamalet Talbayev

CFP for a special issue of the European Journal of Humour Research

CFP for a special issue of the European Journal of Humour Research

Mad Max: Fury Road has been critiqued for its feminist, masculine, biblical, and environmental themes, but these critiques fail to engage with the connection between humans, machines, and the Earth in Fury Road. Nuclear technology may have produced the apocalyptic wasteland in which the film is set, but machines and industrial technology remain…[Read more]

In the 2005 film Corpse Bride, director Tim Burton and composer Danny Elfman collaborate using both musical and visual signifiers to create two very different realms that the main characters must traverse: the land of the living, and the land of the dead. The characterizations of these places appear in the reverse of what a viewer might expect.…[Read more]