“The Secret Life of Fiction” uses cognitive literary theory to critique the failure of “The Common Core Standards Initiative” to recognize fiction as a catalyst of complex thinking in students.

In this article I examine the way Collins, in her young adult novel Mockingjay, connects historical context of an urban firebombing like those frequently seen during World War II, with the fictional presentation of a firebombing reminiscent of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five to present the horrors of war to a new generation. I then show how she m…[Read more]

An examination of authenticity in expertise in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea , this presentation will argue that By the Sea depicts an ambivalence about professional experts, creators of maps who are imagined alternately as summarizing colonizers and as authentic keepers of cultural knowledge. It is only by looking beyond state-sanctioned…[Read more]

Published as part of the Theories and Methodologies section on Oceanic Studies.

The British and Canadian authors Lawrence Durrell and M. G. Vassanji do not, at first thought, call out for a comparative study. Neither are typically regarded in criticism through their origins or ethnicity. The focus instead goes to their characters and subject matter, their cosmopolitan experiences. Confusions surrounding both authors have…[Read more]

This essay was one of the first to challenge the over-stress on close reading as the key to literary appreciation, by advocating a greater stress on literature’s broader context and its achievement in social, political, and religious terms.

This chapter extends the focus of wartime trauma scholarship to recognise female
non-combatants’ variants of traumatic victimisation and agency, as presented in the
Middle Eastern and African contexts. The agency of such actors, who suffered
tragically from the traumas of war, was inexplicably overlooked in both Middle
Eastern and African l…[Read more]

Worldviews in Literature: An Anthology responds to UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova’s 2012 global initiatives for study of world literature for a “New Humanism” along with Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s directive for world literature “to discover what is universal across national literatures.” Worldviews includes fifteen authors fro…[Read more]

“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era. Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon l…[Read more]

“A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life,” writes Vladimir Nabokov in his memoir, Speak, Memory. In our course “What is Memory?” we read and write with Nabokov’s life story using our own form of Gregory Ulmer’s “mystory” mode of writing as a way to discover the life cycles of memories–ours and our students as well…[Read more]

This article reads South African science-fiction writer Lauren Beukes’s first novel, Moxyland (2008) set in a futuristic Cape Town, from the perspective of Lindsay Bremner’s notion of “citiness”– or how cities produce the modernity of the subjects who inhabit them. The novel is remarkable for its dependence on the social geography of the South A…[Read more]

At the height of their popularity, performing animals appeared in over half of all big-time vaudeville bills and were highly significant to its business model. They were booked to draw children and their mothers to matinee performances and, as consistent sources of novelty, to create crucial word-of-mouth interest in the bill’s weekly line-up. V…[Read more]

Editorial response to “The Coddling of the American Mind” in the September issue of “The Atlantic”

These lesson plans and corresponding handouts introduce students to methods in digital humanities (distant reading, narrative mapping, and sentiment analysis). They are aligned with the K-12 Common Core State Standards and informed by university-level DH discourses. Developed in collaboration with high school English teachers, these materials are…[Read more]

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]

An examination of crime and criminality in colonial and postcolonial India through life-writing and the examples of Thugs and Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen.