The STC Macbeth’s setting and predominantly multiethnic cast brought to mind Orson Welles’s landmark 1936 Macbeth which was set in Haiti and featured an all-black cast. In both cases, the ethnicity and race of the cast matched that of the characters and cultures in the adaptation’s respective universe. Tommy’s production engaged in two models…[Read more]

“Barbie-Q” (1991) by Chicana Sandra Cisneros and “The Couch” (2010) by Emirati Fatima H. Al Mazrouei lend themselves to a comparative study for several reasons. Both short stories present female narrators who desire the object identified in the title of each story. In each story, this item carries significant symbolic value. Both poetic prose t…[Read more]

‘Lijken op liefde’ (“Looks Like Love”; 1997) is the second novel in Astrid Roemer’s “Suriname Trilogy.” Alternating narrative perspectives and time, the three texts revolve around the country’s independence from Holland (in 1975) and the impact this historical process has had on the population. With an emphasis on the potential of creolizatio…[Read more]

This essay identifies four major factors responsible for the use of vernacular in Anglophone Caribbean poetry. Analyses of selected texts by Lorna Goodison, Louise Bennett, Kendel Hippolyte, and DerekWalcott illustrate that these four factors include the representation of working class characters, subversive protests against the imposition of…[Read more]

The final two months of 2017 witnessed a renaissance of an always-popular meme on Metafilter, Twitter: parodies of William Carlos Williams’s 1934 poem, “This Is Just to Say.” Parodies typically replace nouns and adjectives in this twelve-line, three-stanza Imagist poem. A minimum of six replacements yields an entirely new poem, such that users…[Read more]

The twenty-first century has seen a transformation of twentieth-century narrative and historical discourse. On the one hand, the Cold War national fantasy of mutually assured destruction has multiplied, producing a diverse array of apocalyptic visions. On the other, there has been an increasing sobriety about human finitude, especially considered…[Read more]

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Blog, 28 March 2018. A Q&A about the essay “JavaScript Affogato: Programming a Culture of Improvised Expertise,” published in Configurations 26.1 (2018): 47–72, DOI: 10.1353/con.2018.0002.

An analysis of criticism of Charles Dickens by his contemporaries G. H. Lewes and Hippolyte Taine. Both assessments address Dickens’s popularity by relying on commonplace concepts from Victorian anthropology. However, Lewes argues for a new form of critical practice addressed to popular fiction and addresses the inadequacy of existing critical…[Read more]

An analysis of criticism of Charles Dickens by his contemporaries G. H. Lewes and Hippolyte Taine. Both assessments address Dickens’s popularity by relying on commonplace concepts from Victorian anthropology. However, Lewes argues for a new form of critical practice addressed to popular fiction and addresses the inadequacy of existing critical…[Read more]

Part of the Introduction in lieu of an abstract:
Christopher Isherwood’s celebrated novel A Single Man portrays a gay man as an ordinary human being. For its time, the novel’s depiction of homosexuality as a legitimate minoritarian identity, rather than individual pathology, was a radical political gesture. Given this context, literary critics…[Read more]

Abstract: This article evaluates the application of dominant institutional discourses, such as psychoanalysis, in the interpretation of literary fiction. I take up the case of Jean Rhys and her 1929 novel _Quartet_. Both author and novel have been analyzed through the concept of masochism, as creating masochistic characters or a masochistic…[Read more]

This article examines Sphinx, the debut novel of the French novelist Anne Garréta, which was recently published in English translation in 2015. The reception of Sphinx in both French and English has focused primarily on Garréta’s virtuosic removal of gender from a love story, passing over a caricatural and crude rendering of racial difference tha…[Read more]

Culture and traditions constitute the essential elements in the process of Polish language education. The textbook Hurra po polsku. Podręcznik studenta by Małgorzata Małolepsza & Aneta Szymkiewicz in Lesson 0 introduces briefly Polish phonetic system and greeting expressions without offering any follow up exercises in the Hurra po polsku. Ze…[Read more]

This essay attempts a philological, meaning a both technically and socially attentive historical study of an individual computer programming language, JavaScript. From its introduction, JavaScript’s reception by software developers, and its importance in web development as we now understand it, was structured by a continuous negotiation of e…[Read more]

Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz’s field-defining article, “The New Modernist Studies,” turns ten in 2018. Despite the fact that the article takes up new media as a key topic-and although it was published just after ground-breaking work in the “visual turn” of literary studies by Mary Lou Emery (Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature,…[Read more]

Recent scholarship has focused on the flowering of poetry that engaged with geographic and spatial logics in the United States in the years following the Second World War, notably in Lytle Shaw’s 2013 study Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics. Alongside such works as William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and Charles Olson’s Maxim…[Read more]