This essay offers a critical reading of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland as a “neo-cosmopolitan fiction,” one which is invested in imagining a transnational and global community, in order to initiate a new analytical framework for South Asian diasporic literature. I argue that this critical framework not only challenges the notion of literary canon…[Read more]

This primer in “cognitive cultural studies” explores the cultural fantasy of perfect access to mind through body. It shows that different genres and media—movies, novels, classic Chinese operas, medieval ribald tales, musicals, paintings, documentaries, stand-up comedy, and photography—have different strategies for making us think that we have ju…[Read more]

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an author, letter writer and poet who lived between 1890 and 1937. His works blend science fiction with Gothic themes. Lovecraft was, by the majority of accounts (including his own), a bad writer. He was also an outspoken racist for the majority of his life to a degree which makes much of his work, to a modern reader,…[Read more]

This paper offers a synthesis and critique of the existing academic literature on Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese and an overview of Asian American alternative comics. It examines the range of literary and linguistic sources which Yang draws upon in his collage of Chinoiserie and Japonism. It presents the argument that existing criticism h…[Read more]

This paper explores the manifestation of trauma in superhero comics following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11. These texts are considered from the perspectives of clinical psychology and Silverman’s concept of historical trauma. The paper first examines the genre as a whole, followed by an exploration of elements c…[Read more]

Introduction to Modernism: Evolution of an Idea, which traces the emergence and coherence of the term “modernism”, and the field of modernist studies, from the late 1800s to the present.

Early American studies scholar and feminist literary critic, Annette Kolodny, offers three projects that she would take on if she were not now retiring from the profession. These three projects include a feminist analysis of women’s interactions on the earliest contact and frontier landscapes; the development of a cross- and inter-disciplinary…[Read more]

Blog on writing about writing sessions from MLA 2016

I argue that The Elements of Style by Strunk and White comes out of a history connecting it to the nineteenth century “conversation handbook” (Connors) and other cultural guides to middlebrow identity formation including The Book-Of-The-Month Club. The Elements of Style is a guide to a genteel language performance rooted in the racialized,…[Read more]

This article shows how Rachna Mara’s collection of short stories Of Customs and Excise puts forth a cosmopolitan feminism that reveals the losses and gains of diaspora in an arena of partiality and relationality.

If Jane Austen had wanted to write about zombies, what might she have known about the walking dead in the early nineteenth century? In this 2010 presidential address for EC/ASECS, subsequently published in the society’s newsletter, I examine this question and take a look at Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

It has long been acknowledged that syntactic violations in poetry are central to the difficulty of a poetic text (e.g. Fowler 1971, Fois-Kaschel 2002, Burke 2007, Thoms 2008). However, for all its merits, most of the work carried out so far tends either to be more concerned with linguistic theory than with literary effects (i.e. the generativist…[Read more]