The syllabus for science fiction course offered Spring 2021 in the English Department at Davidson College.

Birds are everywhere in nineteenth-century American literature, including the work of Emily Dickinson. Women poets often referred to their poems in terms of making songs. This essay rethinks the birds in Dickinson’s letters and poems. It suggests that Dickinson’s birds, and their songs, show her awareness of business. They exist within com…[Read more]

Italy was Muriel Spark’s elective country of residence for 40 years, the first decade of which, from 1967, when she settled in Rome, till the end of the 70s, represented one of the most contradictory and yet intellectually fertile periods of Italian modern history. Notwithstanding such long-lasting and meaningful bond, explicitly represented in a…[Read more]

This autoethnographic exploration, describes and reflects upon my attempt to crowdsource a modern myth on the origins of racism in America. It draws on my work in narrative studies with a special focus on stories and their role in human development. Part one is analysis of the ‘functions’ of story as both plot variables and sociological act…[Read more]

This article is a slightly revised version of a plenary panel address presented at the ‘Passages’ Symposium at the Sorbonne, Paris on the 12th of June 2019, in honor of the centenary of the birth of the American poet Robert Duncan. The article traces some of the mutual interest and influence between the poets Robert Duncan and Hilda Doolittle…[Read more]

This article is a slightly revised version of a plenary panel address presented at the ‘Passages’ Symposium at the Sorbonne, Paris on the 12th of June 2019, in honor of the centenary of the birth of the American poet Robert Duncan. The article traces some of the mutual interest and influence between the poets Robert Duncan and Hilda Doolittle…[Read more]

Emily Dickinson’s unique style of poetic composition is marked by ambiguity and open-endedness, leading to the genesis of a privileged space wherein reader and writer are able to meet as co-creators of meaning. As a poet, Dickinson addresses many themes in ways that are subject to countless layers of interpretation. This essay focuses p…[Read more]

This commemorative and retrospective memoir examines events fifty years ago in the interests of tracking and placing the editorial ideals and dynamics of the journal “Works & Days”, founded in 1978 and published through 2019. The author was one of the original co-founders of the journal, as well as a contributor and member of the editorial board…[Read more]

This article is a sustained profile and study of prominent Northern Irish poet Sinead Morrissey’s complete run of work from the 1990s through 2018. The article examines closely the developing course of her poetry as well as the developing itinerary of her poetics, especially in the light of her transatlantic poetics as well as local and…[Read more]

Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” is known for its seductive writing despite its destructive subject matter. How does this novel accomplish such a juxtaposition? How does the novel keep the reader interested despite Humber blatantly attacking Dolores Haze? This essay explores critically explores the technical method which Nabokov uses in “Lolita.” The…[Read more]

Review of The Halberd at Red Cliff: Jian’an and the Three Kingdoms, by Xiaofei Tian (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2018)

In his essay “The Poet,” Emerson called for the poet who would sing the burgeoning nation of the United States of America. The answer to his request far exceeded all his expectations in the form of a ground-breaking volume of poems where Walt Whitman sang not only a nation, but the people who inhabited it as the people incarnated the values, str…[Read more]

What would English literary history look like if the unit of measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn preceded pentameter, the…[Read more]

A Companion to World Literature. John Wiley and Sons, 2020. Available in Wiley Online Library, https://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118635193

Review of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel, by David Kurnick

Bringing together theoretical writing on objects, testimony, and trauma to develop the category of the “nonhuman witness,” this essay considers the narrative, ethical, and ecological work performed by peripheral objects in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974). Coetzee’s insistent object catalogues acquire narrative agency and provide material for a c…[Read more]

​This chapter explores some legal and literary ramifications of “accident” in British law and society from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century. This period saw changes in common law and legislation relating to accidents, including the emergence of negligence as a distinct tort and statutory provisions for employer liabi…[Read more]