An introduction to a newly published edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Christina Rossetti, sexuality, narrative poems

This paper analyzes Walt Whitman’s American Civil War poems in his collection Drum-Taps
in comparison with the poetry written by British soldier-poets of WWI. These poems present
Whitman as a problematic model for future generations of war poets since he hardly ever
questions the meaninglessness of bloodshed in the battlefield, a trait which i…[Read more]

This essay intervenes in current ecocritical debates about the relationship between fiction and environmental risk by analyzing the limits of risk theory in the deep time of the Anthropocene. Although contemporary ecocriticism argues that we must move from apocalyptic depictions of risk to realistic ones, this essay examines fictions of nuclear…[Read more]

This article analyzes the connections between Lorde’s representations of blindness in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and its connection to lesbian sexuality.

Feminist resistance has been crucial for Argentina’s recovery from the military dictatorship of 1976-1983. Alicia Partnoy was “disappeared” into one of hundreds of torture centers sardonically called “Little Schools.” After her release and exile to the United States, she published her poetic testimony, The Little School, with Cleis Press in 1986.…[Read more]

This workbook provides a brief introduction to digital text analysis through a series of three-part units. Each unit introduces students to a concept, a tool for or method of digital text analysis, and a series of exercises for practicing the new skills. In some cases, studies of particular projects are presented instead of tools in the third…[Read more]

From the twelfth century to the seventeenth, political prophecy was prominent among English literary genres no less than in English political life. Derived from Welsh poetic tradition via Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin History of the Kings of Britain, prophecy reached all social classes. Prophetic texts influenced the decisions of kings, shaped p…[Read more]

This essay explores the cultural legacy of Hindustani, which names the intimate overlap between two South Asian languages, Hindi and Urdu. Hindi and Urdu have distinct religious identities, national associations and scripts, yet they are nearly identical in syntax, diverging to some extent in their vocabulary. Hindi and Urdu speakers,…[Read more]

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

New scholarly books in religious studies defy easy labels and reflect the eagerness of publishers to widen academic discourse and to upset conventional wisdom in the name of new knowledge—in science, across genders, between faiths, and around the world.

My paper argues for a shift in our theoretical focus on time in narrative dialectics and a post-Barthesian semiotic model for critical interpretations of Latino/a/x border narratives. Currently, we know that border narratives reveal the underlying patterns of literary communicative acts of difference (i.e., oral and literary ambiguity, high…[Read more]

As part of my research, I argue that one important way the definition of a feminist borderland develops in these narratives is from a female character’s knowledge of and interpretation of her physical presence within the borderlands. By applying Linda Martín Alcoff’s theories of gender “positionality” and “self-embodiment” from her text Visible…[Read more]

From the original paper presentation: In this paper I discuss the figurative language used in Louise Erdrich’s novel Tracks with a particular focus on the figures and symbols associated with food and food practices. This paper performs a textual analysis of figurative language and symbols and the themes of food and food practices to reveal the…[Read more]

From the original abstract file: This paper presentation examines the hermeneutic and epistemological impacts of developing a feminist praxis for researching borderland narratives in the northern Americas. Borderlands in the northern Americas will be discussed as lands that border two countries (one of which is the U.S.), islands that border…[Read more]

This paper discusses the relationships made between ghost figures and their living relatives within Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In this paper I argue that a specific female identity and agency is represented in these texts through figurative language and symbolization of…[Read more]

The discussion of postmodernism involving modernity and its ramifications requires contemporary and cross-cultural perspectives.