This paper aims to define the concepts of “material thought” and “material time,” as they are theorized by Proust in the Preface of his Ruskin’s Amiens Bible translation, and as they are developed throughout the Recherche. In Proust’s oeuvre ‘material thought’ manifests itself mostly in linguistic and stylistic features, or in concrete images,…[Read more]

How to Revise a True War Story is the first book-length study of O’Brien’s archival papers at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center. Drawing on extensive study of drafts and other prepublication materials, as well as the multiple published versions of O’Brien’s works, John K. Young tells the untold stories behind the production of such k…[Read more]

Fantastic tales of rebellious robots and animated artifacts are a permanent fixture in popular culture. What kind of behavior do we expect from such conceptual hybrids in science fiction, nonsense poetry, and surrealist art?

This article examines the poetry of Cuban writer Cristina Ayala emphasizing the political value of her use of a rhetoric of heroism, a discursive device that masks her demands for recognition of women’s rights and those of Afro-Cubans. The analysis of her poetry suggests that the symbolic manipulation of the “hero” and the representation of “colo…[Read more]

This essay proposes the concept of literary immanence as a new critical model for reading world literature from the perspective of the specific situation experienced by the subject as he or she encounters the world. The literary event is instantiated within three discursive domains: literary immanence, the literary situation into which the subject…[Read more]

This article examines the performativity of novelistic discourse in order to propose a different set of terms for understanding the circulation of the novel around the world than those that are based on the referential form/content model.

Levinas’s treatment of persecution as the inaugural basis of ethical responsibility tacitly relies on the ethical subject’s availability for seduction through an invitation to profane the beloved that is the obverse of the face. Using Jean Laplanche’s conception of the enigmatic signifier, I interpret the face–beloved dyad as a pathological r…[Read more]

On performativity of Dickens as author in his prefaces

On performativity of Dickens as author in his prefaces

The animal characteristics of the monster in late Victorian gothic fiction make visible the biopolitical rationalisation of life in modern societies. Key moments in Bram Sto- ker’s Dracula and R.L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde provide evidence for the animality of late Victorian gothic monsters. In an extended reading of Ric…[Read more]

The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organizations, from art history to zoology. But does “excellence” actually mean anything? Does this pervasive narrative of “excellence” do any good? Drawing on a range of sources we…[Read more]

An approach to understanding modernism in literary history through the lens of translation by tracing the work of key figures such as Pound, Dos Passos, Jiménez, and Unamuno to translate US and Spanish literatures after the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Contribution to “Why Teach Literature?” Program arranged by the forum TM The Teaching of Literature. Gaurav G. Desai, Tulane U, presiding.