Will students raised on social media still read English literature?
• What is the role of English/American literature in the PRC, India,
Australasia, the USA?
• What is the role of English language in relation to other global
and local languages?
• What is the role of decolonising efforts?
• How do our respective state apparatuses affect…[Read more]

This contains a table of contents and description for the book, The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary Modernity: Writing in Constellation, as a follow up to my paper for the 2024 MLA. Chapter One formed the basis for “Góngora, Inca Garcilaso, and the Meeting of Humanist and Indigenous Modes of Knowledge.”

This essay considers the shortfalls of globalizing tendencies in nineteenth-century
literary studies with a focus on the Ottoman Turkish articulation of romanticism, i.e.,
hayaliyyun. Retrieving a historically and geographically hybrid genealogy of romanticism
through the Ottoman Turkish context, my discussion situates romantic imaginary…[Read more]

Centering on the poetry of Şeyh Galib (1757–1799), this article considers Ottoman imperial sovereignty in tandem with the discourse of mysticism that underpinned it. A key rhetorical device that enables the abstraction of the politics of empire in this discourse is the metaphor of the beloved sovereign. In the mystical writing of Galib, this me…[Read more]

Registered in Romantic depictions of imperial ruins is the endurance of empire in its immateriality: the imageries of empire’s ruination announce a future where imperial sovereignty maintains its presence spectrally. Using Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology, and recruiting further insight from political theory, this essay argues that emp…[Read more]

Anthropomorphism, which combines two Greek words, anthropos and morphe, meaning “human” and “form’ respectively, is a term that reflects our attribution of human characteristics to non-human animals and objects, bestowing upon them agency (Taylor 2011: 266). In this respect, we elevate the status of the non-human animal, moving it from being a…[Read more]

Thomas à Kempis wrote that everyone desires peace but not the things that make for peace. Such a universal desire would be a hopeful sign, a foundation to build on as we contemplate (and, no doubt, debate) “the things that make for peace.” I offer as murder is to crow as a record of “perchings” in my contemplation of things that make for peace.…[Read more]

Surround sound is often mistaken as a relatively new phenomenon in cinemas, one that emerged in the 1970s with the arrival of Dolby. Making Stereo Fit reveals that, in fact, filmmakers have been creating stereo and surround-sound effects for nearly a century, since the advent of talking pictures, and argues that their endurance owes primarily to…[Read more]

‘Modernism and Religion’ argues that modernism participated in broader processes of religious change in the twentieth century. The new prominence accorded to immanence and immediacy in religious discourse is carried over into the modernist epiphany. Modernism became mystical. The emergence of Catholic theological modernism, human rights, Christian…[Read more]

Cognitive science can help literary scholars formulate specific questions to be answered by archival research. This essay takes as its starting point embedded mental states (that is, mental states about mental states) and their role in generating literary subjectivity. It then follows the transformation of embedded mental states throughout several…[Read more]

This essay exemplifies a cognitive approach to literary and film studies, with particular emphasis on fictional reimagining of legal institutions. It draws on research of cognitive scientists who study metacognition—specifically, the difference between reflective and intuitive beliefs—to suggest that courtroom dramas, such as Billy Wilder’s Witne…[Read more]

In der Einleitung zum Sammelband Auditive Wissenskulturen – Das Wissen klanglicher Praxis stellen die Autoren zuerst die Diskrepanzen der jeweiligen Beziehungen des Visuellen und des Auditiven zu Wissen anhand einiger Beispiele vor. Sie exemplifzieren auch, wie sowohl auditive Praxis als auch die Hervorbringung und Vermittlung von Wissen in s…[Read more]

the epic opposite is the tenth of a series of ten collections that draw on material from notebooks I kept between 2004 and 2013. I returned to that material in 2021 with Basho and haibun in mind, as well as the prosimetrum tradition that flourished in medieval Europe. Both play off a tension between poetry and prose, and, looking back, that is…[Read more]