A literary analysis and summary of John Burnside’s poem “The Painter Fabritius Begins Work on the Lost Noli Me Tangere of 1652” (2,570 words)

This essay explores the radical subjectivism of Oscar Wilde’s novella “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889/1921), which celebrates the creative potential of nonessentialist forms of identity and yet cautions against jettisoning humanist notions of selfhood entirely. I contend that Wilde turned to G. W. F. Hegel’s performative theory of lyric…[Read more]

In this essay, I argue that Walter Pater’s description of “Euphuism” in Marius the Epicurean (1885) relies upon the insights of idealist philosophy in order to articulate a theory of what Rebecca Walkowitz calls “cosmopolitan style.” Specifically, Pater draws upon a disparate number of cultural discourses in his articulation of Euphuism while…[Read more]

The connection between philosophy and real or everyday language belongs to Wordsworth’s early poetic vision. My interest in Wordsworth’s dialogue with philosophical thinking leads me to turn neither to studies tracing the varied philosophic influences on his poetics nor to those examining the influence of his collaborator Coleridge on his ear…[Read more]

The argument in this essay is that Dickinson’s poetics of inner life makes us see anew the long-standing philosophical problem of expression. Dickinson’s poetry invests itself in an understanding of subjectivity that rearranges the anchors we often turn to in thinking about how lives and identities take on shape in expressive forms. Poetry for…[Read more]

Michael Fried has returned to the distinction between “absorption” and “theatricality” in all of his art-historical criticism since he first introduced the dyad in 1980. This essay argues that the term “absorption” is rich with a philosophical significance that echoes central concerns long at play in philosophy’s thinking about the status of art…[Read more]

This is the UNEDITED PRE-PRINT of my section of the multi-authored article “Journal of a Plague Year: Six Voices from American Universities,” ed. Christa Jansohn, which appeared in _Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen_. The other authors were Andrew James Hartley, Jean Howard, Christoph Irmscher, Anthony Lioi, and Lisa S.…[Read more]

This is the Call for Papers for Debates in Digital Humanities Pedagogy, which was originally published in January 2019 at http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/cfps/cfp_2019_pedagogy.html. The site no longer exists, so we are depositing it here for archival and citational purposes.

In this paper, in a panel co-sponsored by the MLA Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession and the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, I summarize some of the structural and practical problems that challenge contingent scholars when they try to publish their work in scholarly journals. I share the record of the online, multimedia,…[Read more]

Syllabus, course schedule, and major assignments for “Data and the Human” (HON 202-006), an interdisciplinary honors seminar offered in Fall 2020 at NC State University.

Digital editions are easily modified after they are first published — a state of affairs that poses challenges both for long-term scholarly reference and for various forms of electronic distribution and analysis. This article argues that producers of digital editions should assign meaningful version numbers to their editions and update those v…[Read more]

Attention in the humanities has lately turned to the re-thinking of traditional modes of publishing. But is the academy prepared to assess work that deviates from the recognised forms and formats associated with ‘digging down and standing back’ (Felski 2015, p. 52)? This chapter investigates whether humanistic research, usually expressed in wor…[Read more]

Graduate seminar syllabus: In this seminar, we will explore the contemporary comic, considering literary and cultural works across a range of platforms and markets. Comics are still frequently (and historically) associated with popular culture, and linked to children’s literature and mass media, even as they loom large through big and small screen…[Read more]