In the natural order of language development orality precedes literary production, but elements of the oral tradition do often appear in literature. In this presentation I will look at orality in some Judeo-Spanish and Spanglish texts to see how the study of these two lects together may better inform the translator. Though both are lects of…[Read more]

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20077873

How does our daily mindreading—that is, our attribution and misattribution of mental states (such as thoughts, feelings, and intentions) to ourselves and others—differ from the mindreading we engage in when we read fiction? I have argued elsewhere (e.g., “Secret Life of Fiction,” PMLA, 2015) that drama, novels, and narrative poetry play and exp…[Read more]

This essay draws on cognitive literary theory to offer new ways of reading Cao Xueqin’s classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢) aka The Story of the Stone.

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 course considers literary experiment instigated by the Internet and exercised on both analogue and digital platforms. When we think of “hacking,” we frequently think of solitary computer programmers in dark rooms. But hacking also implies a culture of profane disruption that closely mirrors developments in literary experimentation over the…[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.

The Dialogus de appetenda gloria qui inscribitur Gonsalus (1523) is Juan Gine´s de Sepu´ lveda’s first reflection on the moral aspects of war. In it, he addresses whether it is morally licit for Christians to desire worldly honor and glory, a question that Christian mystics, Irenicists, and humanists like Desiderius Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives pos…[Read more]

The Dialogus de appetenda gloria qui inscribitur Gonsalus (1523) is Juan Gine´s de Sepu´ lveda’s first reflection on the moral aspects of war. In it, he addresses whether it is morally licit for Christians to desire worldly honor and glory, a question that Christian mystics, Irenicists, and humanists like Desiderius Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives pos…[Read more]

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]

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]

As in other early language traditions, premodern English poetry was written out with very light punctuation. The sparsity of manuscript punctuation appears especially problematic in the period before 1200, when poetry in English lacked visual linebreaks. The difficulties of parsing this poetry are substantial. Modern editors of Old English verse…[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]

Document annotation is almost as old as writing. The designers of the World Wide Web envisioned a system that would allow people to publicly annotate any document. The advent of cloud computing has finally made this feasible: distributed annotation systems like Hypothes.is allow users to save annotations privately, or share them with the public.…[Read more]

I was the invited respondent for this panel of papers jointly-sponsored by the CLCS Celtic and Old English MLA Forums. These are the remarks which I prepared in response to the papers in order to help draw them together into a frame to generate discussion, and which were read for me in abstentia.

Book history, letterpress conservation, pedagogy, humanities-STEM education

This workshop (session 362 at the 2018 convention) served as an introduction to the nonprofit scholarly network Humanities Commons and its open-access repository, CORE. Attendees learned how to gain more readers while increasing the impact of their work, make interdisciplinary connections, build class blogs and collaborative Web sites, find and…[Read more]

Anna Ella Carroll was one of the more remarkable, if relatively unknown, business and political writers during the Civil War era. She wrote government pamphlets that explained complex legal issues, lobbied for the railroad industry by writing business articles, and campaigned on behalf of governors and presidents. This paper explores Carroll’s i…[Read more]