“Carbon and Conferences (Again)” offers one person’s experience of trying to get to the Austin MLA conference by a means other than airplanes. It asks fellow MLA members for more collective, mindful attention to the carbon footprint of the conference generally. While acknowledging the intellectual and personal joy in face to face encounters, it…[Read more]

Most critics of contemporary literature have reached a consensus that what was once called “postmodernism” is over and that its signature modes—metafiction and irony—are on the wane. This is not the case, however, with videogames. In recent years, a number of self-reflexive games have appeared, exemplified by Davey Wreden’s The Stanley Parable (…[Read more]

This paper argues that there is a need to look beyond what is merely “homeward” in the work of Thomas Wolfe. I take up Wai Chee Dimock’s expansive conception of American literature as “a crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures,” demonstrating how Thomas…[Read more]

Kafka’s last short story: Josephine die Saengerin – as translated by Phillip Lundberg. Copyright Free translation as stated on the copyright page of Essential Kafka.

This article reads Albert Renger-Patzsch’s photographic theory and practice in the context of Benjamin’s and Brecht’s dismissals of his work in order to recover the paradoxical interplay between documentation and perceptual training central to debates about photography as a specifically modern medium during the 1920s. I argue that, rather than…[Read more]

This is a book about the power game currently being played out between two symbiotic cultural institutions: the university and the novel. As the number of hyper-knowledgeable literary fans grows, students and researchers in English departments waver between dismissing and harnessing voices outside the academy. Meanwhile, the role that the…[Read more]

The “Urlo”. From the deconstructive rage/fury to the ‘yes’ assertion.
In this article we offer a series of tableaux belonging to contemporary Romance literatures written by women, through a focus on a common feature which is that of the “urlo” (scream). Based on a selection of works mainly Italian, but also taken from other literatures of the Rom…[Read more]

Sumilla:
El presente trabajo se plantea en función de la consideración de una nueva forma de organización, formación y comunicación ciudadana que se ha movilizado en defensa del patrimonio biocultural en el Triángulo norte de América Central: la creación y el uso de espacios digitales como parte de un activismo medioambiental multimodal. En mano…[Read more]

This article gestures to the 1930s through 1950s inter­national anarchist literary networks that ran from Paris to London and Athens, Cairo and Alexandria, Shang­hai, Oxford and Cambridge, New York and San Francisco, and finally Big Sur and Vancouver. The distribution across these nodes was intense and sustained, but this project only hints at t…[Read more]

This article presents a digital environmental media studies (DEMS) framework that shifts the primary focus of digital media study from one grounded in computation to one fully rooted in the earth. DEMS proposes a relational, metabolic ontology wherein popular media theory terms like atmospheric media, elemental media, cyborg, and digital labor are…[Read more]

Abstract: This article poses a challenge to contemporary historicist tendency to silence significant semantic threads within Hamlet, attempts to restore our critical interest in the age-old problem of delay of the protagonist, and thus distinguish the text in itself from its historicised version. In doing so, my over-all argument proposes an…[Read more]

Undergraduate syllabus for a course combining media studies with creative production practices in digital narratives and culture. Designed for delivery online, with an emphasis on individual projects.

Modern Chinese fiction dealing with cultural others can be taken as a lens through which to reread the cosmopolitan theory. At stake in the debate between communitarianism and liberalism are the viability of single cultural membership and its validity. Lao She’s Self-Sacrifice (1934) and Dr. Wen (1936-1937) question the viability of global c…[Read more]

Visual Ethnography, Stereotypes, and Photographing Algeria

The poetics and esthetics of “natural occupancy” are relevant to the ways in which settlers’ colonists artistically and discursively produce their subsequent cultural formations. I focus on the decade of the 1950s to chart specific settler ideologies of ownership that emerged in
Israel after the establishment of the state in 1948. What are the v…[Read more]