Wikis have become enormously attractive to Internet users because they are open-access web pages or networks of web pages that can be modified by any interested editors, making them perpetual works-in-progress that evolve and change at the behest of their contributors. Wikipedia, the limitless fountain of collected, and sometimes inaccurate,…[Read more]

Designed as a short introduction to academic literary studies of affect, Reading Affect in Literary Studies is a one-credit graduate seminar, offered in Spring 2014, that was framed by the question of how we might rethink our practice as scholars of literature to take our scholarship to publics beyond the academy. Readings included work by Rita…[Read more]

Designed as a short introduction to academic literary studies of affect, Reading Affect in Literary Studies is a one-credit graduate seminar, offered in Spring 2014, that was framed by the question of how we might rethink our practice as scholars of literature to take our scholarship to publics beyond the academy. Readings included work by Rita…[Read more]

Although the question of the role of empathy in our experience of fiction is currently an active one in psychology, most of the relevant research has been conducted on popular literature and film. This dissertation seeks to change that by using cognitive approaches to literature to examine how and why postmodern texts disrupt the reader or…[Read more]

This paper traces the origins of Chicana-centered figures and tropes found in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God to early 20th century cuentos recorded in the New Mexico Federal Writer’s Project.

Literatura (búsqueda) + Fármaco (remedio y veneno) = literatura fantástica. Posibles reacciones: lectura obsesionada y sin parar, entrada a otras dimensiones de la realidad, nuevas maneras de entender la relación entre sujeto y objeto. Este curso se centra en la farmacia literaria del escritor argentino Julio Cortázar, además de aquéllos que in…[Read more]

Course Description: As German intellectual Walter Benjamin writes in his essay “The Storyteller”, “Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn.” In the process of sharing experiences, more stories are born with authorship that are common while at the same time recognizing the individ…[Read more]

This paper questions how Wolfgang’s Schivelbusch’s seminal study of railway networks in 19th-century should lead us to think differently about trains and transportation within steampunk. The paper considers how both the railway and steampunk annihilate space and time; act as transportation networks; and foreground reading practices, or the lack…[Read more]

Gumbo has become the metaphorical melting pot of Louisiana, often reducing complex histories to simple lists of ingredients. This essay offers a more complex history of the dish itself, as well as refuting some of the common misconceptions about the dish and Louisiana foodways found in popular media.