This essay examines the relationship between modernist formal experimentation and rehabilitative futurism, the modern cultural fantasy of a hygienic future in which all illness and disability have been eradicated. Through a reading of Kenneth Burke’s early essay collection Counter-Statement (1931) and his first and only novel, Towards a Better…[Read more]

Abstracts for the panel “Graphic Atwood” proposed by the Margaret Atwood Society for the 2020 MLA Convention.

Explores Douglas Coupland’s “Generation X” as almost a Gen Xer’s “version of John Updike’s Couples”; that is, as, a place where, like Updike’s book, friends create a community isolated only to themselves. Though unlike Updike’s work, where — considering the time it was written in, the ’70s, where a generation succeeded in overtly contesting and…[Read more]

Explores how Max Vigne, from Andrea Barrett’s “Servants of the Map,” makes use of the dangerous Himalayan mountain environment as almost as Winnicottian “play space,” in which to recover from being requited to a life of obligation, rather than real-self discovery, after his mother’s death.

Visualization tools can allow academics to produce their own diagrams without necessarily hiring a designer. I will walk through some examples of diagrams produced in Palladio, a digital humanities package developed in the Humanities + Design Lab at Stanford University. Palladio lends itself to qualitative studies because the visualizations that…[Read more]

Explores the invisible man, in Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man,” as borrowing upon associations of patriarchal maleness, in the sense Ann Douglas in her “Terrible Honesty” argues 20s modern’s did, to secure freedom from feelings of entrapment by maternal figures, whose near-proximity to him is expressed in the text as often incestuous, gross;…[Read more]

Discussing the concept of cultural trauma and its role in popular television dramas such as 24 (FOX 2001-10, 2014-), Battlestar Galactica (Syfy 2004-9), Rubicon (AMC 2010) and Person of Interest (CBS 2011-16), this paper sets out to identify three distinct clusters that are part of what Newcomb and Hirsch once termed a “cultural forum”—a discu…[Read more]

A review of Stanley Kunitz’s poetry, emphasizing how he used his poetry to both explore and manage his relationship with his dominating mother. Argues that none of Kunitz’s elegies work as conventional elegies, or as we traditionally understand or expect them to work, but more as working their way to the direction Peter Sacks advocates, as…[Read more]

Routledge is doing a series of literature companions. I have been requested to build a proposal for a Literature and Social Class companion text. You are most welcome to pass on this CFP to colleagues. Please see details in attached file. Questions?
Many thanks,
Gloria McMillan, Editor
Email for ideas, communications, and drafts
glomc@dakotacom.net

Explores Maureen Folan, in Martin McDonagh’s “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” as a psychological borderline, someone who is afraid to achieve a man she can have a relationship with, and so defaults to using him as simply another object she can use in warfare against a mother she is only yet capable of playing at being able to leave behind her.