Evoking the creative messiness of an artist’s palette, this Theory Palette depicts nine theoretical concerns as intersecting, blendable paint colors: author, history, culture, psyche, text, reader, literature, language, and embodiment/perception. Just as painters in the same school, theorists blend colors to create their own compositions, s…[Read more]

Evoking the creative messiness of an artist’s palette, this Theory Palette depicts nine theoretical concerns as intersecting, blendable paint colors: author, history, culture, psyche, text, reader, literature, language, and embodiment/perception. Just as painters in the same school, theorists blend colors to create their own compositions, s…[Read more]

Desde el período del Dadá se han ido borrando los límites entre las formas artísticas y sus soportes, entre las estéticas de uso y las estéticas formales, entre los espacios altos y bajos de producción cultural, y también, entre la percepción de centros y periferias que parecen haberse astillado y reproducido a la interioridad de espacios hasta ha…[Read more]

An essay on autobiography in pop songs by women: http://www.theavidlistener.com/2014/12/singing-about-yourself-autobiography-in-pop-music.html

An essay on gender and music in the Star Wars films: http://www.theavidlistener.com/2015/01/hearing-gender-in-george-lucass-galaxy.html

Essay on music inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. http://www.theavidlistener.com/2015/10/heavy-metal-elves.html

Giorgio Agamben defines the sacred man or Homo Sacer as one who is not worthy of sacrifice. Having lost all rights, the person is reduced to the non-human. In modern times, banishment or banning by the law occurs when a state of exception is sanctioned by a totalitarian supremacy that suspends judicial power. The state of exception does not lie…[Read more]

The terms ‘fandom’, ‘fan’, and even ‘fan studies’ appear to be, at first glance, self- evident. But considered in the context of both fan cultures and scholarship outside the English language-centered West, we begin to see the assumptions that underlie them. Whether we are talking about Japanese fans of manga and anime (somewhat codified it…[Read more]

Very short essay on the way Deleuze uses images in his book on Bacon. In the original French edition, the images are in a separate volume; he does that in order to mime, or enact, the theory of sensation in his text. It seems to me this is an unusual and promising strategy for art history (disposing images so their sequence and arrangement…[Read more]

Presents an analysis of the emergence of new genres of international–especially expatriate–fiction in 21st-century US letters.

An examination of spatial themes in the emerging genre of environmental fiction. Originally presented as a talk at the Futures of American Literature event at Uppsala University (Sweden).

A travers l’étude de tout un ensemble de paratextes (des descriptions de tournage aux pratiques du ballyhoo), cet article entend établir la réception des films muets américains sous le mode d’une connivence que permettrait un regard spectatoriel réaliste – connivence qui retrouverait la complicité qu’exigent les manipulations narratives de…[Read more]

From the perspective of 1920s film reception, this chapter proposes to look at Hollywood cinema’s intimacy project – the objective of ‘going into people’s houses’ (Irving Thalberg, 1927) by showing fictions of intimate everyday life. While cinema is consumed in the 1920s in a very theatrical context, it is also, and concurrently, projected…[Read more]

Through a document-based ethno-historical approach, this article shows how cinema in the 1920s managed to inform urban children’s games and world-building activities, contrary to contemporary assumptions from early education reformers and sociologists that informed research into children’s play. I first show how most of this research tried to pro…[Read more]

The silhouetted cutouts in Kara Walker’s Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart are fine with being seen but care little for the actual presence of the viewer. They’re kissing and sucking, fucking and birthing, playing and pillorying all without shame or service to the…[Read more]

In this conference paper I discuss the relationship between some of the most representative visual strategies used by Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai and the different ways in which they relate to the notions of Trauma and Mourning.

This book analyses the various narrative material found in five of the films Susanne Bier directed between 1999 and 2007, four of them belonging to her ‘Danish’ period (The One And Only, Open Hearts, Brothers, After The Wedding), the fifth one being her first American feature (Things We Lost In The Fire). The first part deals with the nar…[Read more]

This book analyses the various narrative material found in five of the films Susanne Bier directed between 1999 and 2007, four of them belonging to her ‘Danish’ period (The One And Only, Open Hearts, Brothers, After The Wedding), the fifth one being her first American feature (Things We Lost In The Fire). The first part deals with the nar…[Read more]