This article covers an entire generation of American popular novels published between the Civil War and World War I: campus fictions, focusing all but exclusively on homosocial scenes of undergraduate merriment. Centering on the camaraderie of fraternal sociality, campus novels model friendship as a democratic ideal for dispensing with conflict,…[Read more]

This article covers an entire generation of American popular novels published between the Civil War and World War I: campus fictions, focusing all but exclusively on homosocial scenes of undergraduate merriment. Centering on the camaraderie of fraternal sociality, campus novels model friendship as a democratic ideal for dispensing with conflict,…[Read more]

This article covers an entire generation of American popular novels published between the Civil War and World War I: campus fictions, focusing all but exclusively on homosocial scenes of undergraduate merriment. Centering on the camaraderie of fraternal sociality, campus novels model friendship as a democratic ideal for dispensing with conflict,…[Read more]

In this article I ask what happens if we consider Jewett, who spent most of her adult life at the epicenter of New England intellectual culture, as a pivotal figure in the Western history of theorizing sexuality, and her 1884 novel, A Country Doctor, as a significant document in the history of theorizing sexual and gender deviation, perfectly…[Read more]

This class asks what sex looked and felt like before the instantiation of modern identity categories such as homosexuality or heterosexuality—before, that is, our desires became an index to our souls. To this end, we’ll examine texts by nineteenth-century American writers that represent the experiences and expressions of what we now call sex…[Read more]

This essay begins with my attempt to close-read a text by a recently departed colleague, Jeffrey B. Ferguson, but turns into an exploration of writing across registers, in this case the delivery of a very different version of the same paper by Ferguson, one that is far more intimate, insightful, and moving.

Two-thirds of the way through Faulkner, Mississippi, his extended meditation on the prose oeuvre of the American writer William Faulkner, Édouard Glissant remarks on Faulkner’s famous ‘amused refusal to “correct the contradictions”’ introduced into his texts through his constant revisiting of characters across novels not necessarily set in proper…[Read more]

The recent surge of interest in Afrofuturism has resulted in some groundbreaking work looking at the ways technology and race intersect in film, fashion, music and literature, as is evidenced by the important collection of essays “Afrofuturism 2.0” (2016), edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones. However there has not yet been an aca…[Read more]

In this article I try to show how the Mexican Revolution was not only national in nature but also helped ordinary individuals break down barriers in their personal lives. The protagonist of Nadie me verá llorar was considered a madwoman in Porfirian society and with the Revolution she comes into her own and finds a space in post revolutionary Mexico D.F.