This essay offers a critique of the vitalist turn in queer and ecological theory, here represented by the work of Karen Barad. Whereas Barad advances an image of life geared towards meaningful connection with others, human and nonhuman, Deleuze advances an a-signifying ontology of self-dismissal. The point of this essay isn’t to separate their t…[Read more]

In his seminal study, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, Eyal Weizman argues how the Israeli occupation has forced a new imagined space to emerge, which is at once confining to the Palestinians and increases their sense of marginalization and loss. Changing the landscape through imposing architecture construction is a way to…[Read more]

The matter of Troilus and Criseyde had been dealt in both England and Scotland in similar yet different ways from the late 14th to the early 17th century. In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385), the conflict between worldly and heavenly love is depicted in a controversial way. Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid (ca. 1480) seems to give a Sco…[Read more]

The critical tradition positions Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser among the pioneers of the nationalistic
movement in Early Modern England. From a historical point of view, this has been the result of the promotion of
Britishness by 19th and 20th century literary critics through their construction of national poets in the literary
canon.…[Read more]

In the Late Elizabethan Period, factionalism complicated the notion of, especially, male friendship. The scarcity of
financial resources of the royal patronage, the arbitrary distribution of favours, and bottom-up pressures of patronees
further problematized a healthy relationship among patrons and patronees and among friends. The horizontal…[Read more]

In the Late Elizabethan Period, factionalism complicated the notion of, especially, male friendship. The scarcity of
financial resources of the royal patronage, the arbitrary distribution of favours, and bottom-up pressures of patronees
further problematized a healthy relationship among patrons and patronees and among friends. The horizontal…[Read more]

How does a woman become a whore? What are the discursive dynamics making a woman a whore? And, more importantly, what are the discursive mechanics of unmaking? In Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal, Cristina León Alfar pursues these questions to tease out familiar cultural stories about female se…[Read more]

This paper interrogates the connection between entities that hover in the liminal state between life and death (such as vampires and spirits) and the manner in which these entities relate to Alaya Dawn Johnson’s conjurings of alternate political structures and hierarchies in her Spirit Binders series. Johnson’s alternate hierarchies are com…[Read more]

Numbers appear to have limited value for literary study, since our discipline is usually more concerned to explore differences of interpretation than to describe the objective features of literary works. But it may be time to re-examine the assumption that numbers are only useful for objective description. Machine learning algorithms are actually…[Read more]

This essay surveys literary criticism at the intersection of narrative theory and the Victorian novel, which often takes one of two major approaches. In the first approach, critics examine how the act of narration itself shapes and constrains Victorian narratives, whereas in the second approach, critics focus on the relationship between Victorian…[Read more]

This essay surveys literary criticism at the intersection of narrative theory and the Victorian novel, which often takes one of two major approaches. In the first approach, critics examine how the act of narration itself shapes and constrains Victorian narratives, whereas in the second approach, critics focus on the relationship between Victorian…[Read more]

The Berliner Repertorium (http://opus.ub.hu-berlin.de/repertorium/page/home), online since June 2017, provides a database of Middle High and Low German translations of Latin hymns, sequences, and antiphons until the year 1600. In this contribution on our database of hymn translations, the ‘Berliner Repertorium’, I will introduce you to its str…[Read more]

This essay argues that the tension in Coetzee’s reading of Robinson Crusoe springs from the exposure of the Christian secret in both the colonial enterprises of the characters and the authorial presences of Defoe and Coetzee. My argument draws on Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death, which outlines how Christianity tacitly incorporates (but doe…[Read more]

Call for Proposals

Media, Lingualisms, Translations: Technologies of Language and Power

Conference to be held November 13-14, 2020; hosted by the School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State University, Tempe.

Keynote speakers: Jean-Noël Robert (Collège de France, Paris)
Lourdes Ortega (Georgetown University, W…[Read more]