A.M. Klein’s “Political Meeting” as problematic as a poem highlighting and delineating a dangerous orator’s power; as really more on which suggests he’s ensnared, enslaved, by the crowd’s expectations and demands of him to “lead” them into particular fervour.

Explores Elizabeth Daryush’s “Children of wealth in your warm nursery” as of a narrator visiting us to warn us about our possible ill-fate, if we don’t “escape..” The game for the reader is to decide if she’s to be trusted, or not.

Daphne Marlatt’s “Healing” as a poem about re-cooperating from the infliction of a triggering, caustic word upon one’s mental composition, using efficacy, experience in knowing composure and competency, as a rebutting counter.

Explores how Phyllis Webb’s “To Those Who Have Also Considered Suicide” is a poem which mischievously induces the reader to become one of the “friends” who undergo the “initiation” of suicide. The reader is encouraged to let go any grievance, however, in consideration of the poet’s successful demonstration of the initiation as involving genuine…[Read more]

A talk given at the ANT workshop at the University of Southern Denmark in 2017. I develop some of these ideas in chapter 4 of my current book

Argues that the way in which Marlow is presented, ensures that Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” is vulnerable as a text that ostensibly helps justify the maintenance of separate spheres between men and women; argues that Marlow’s successful agency is more about his being craftily evasive, a man who doesn’t impose but dodges.

Argues that the way in which Marlow is presented, ensures that Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” is vulnerable as a text that ostensibly helps justify the maintenance of separate spheres between men and women; argues that Marlow’s successful agency is more about his being craftily evasive, a man who doesn’t impose but dodges.

Full collection of essays written during my undergraduate and graduate studies in literature.

While there are differences between cultures in different places and times, colonial representations of indigenous peoples generally suggest they are not capable of literature nor are they worthy of being represented as nations. Colonial representations of indigenous people continue on into the independence era and can still be detected in our…[Read more]

Graduate-level syllabus for a seminar in the Department of English. Neither “history of the book” nor “media studies,” this course sits somewhere in-between combining the ethos of a makerspace with the hands-on resources of a letterpress and book arts studio.

In 1526, royal refiner and natural historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478-1557) praised the singular quality of the “muchos tesoros de oro labrado / en poder delos indios q̄ se hā cōquistado” (lxv, v). By 1535, however, he had to define what, exactly, he meant by gold: “No hablo aquí en el oro que se ha habido por rescates, o en la guerra, ni…[Read more]

In light of (re)new(ed) interest in focusing interdisciplinary scholarly attention on the history of capitalism – a focus captured in Edward Baptist’s recent book, The Half has Never Been Told – this essay reads Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy as a key text for considering the history of capitalism as central to conceptions of circum-…[Read more]

In light of (re)new(ed) interest in focusing interdisciplinary scholarly attention on the history of capitalism – a focus captured in Edward Baptist’s recent book, The Half has Never Been Told – this essay reads Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy as a key text for considering the history of capitalism as central to conceptions of circum-…[Read more]

Front matter for Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century