Calling for a historiographical shift in literary criticism, this essay stresses the expansionist vision of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, approaches its literature as a corpus of representation for imperial subjectivities, and thereby supplements the critique of the narrative of literary modernity identified with the orientalist E. J. W.…[Read more]

Anthropomorphism, which combines two Greek words, anthropos and morphe, meaning “human” and “form’ respectively, is a term that reflects our attribution of human characteristics to non-human animals and objects, bestowing upon them agency (Taylor 2011: 266). In this respect, we elevate the status of the non-human animal, moving it from being a…[Read more]

Abstract | The final scene of Elia Suleiman’s film, It Must be Heaven (2019), ends with the actor/director sitting in an Arab bar in the city of Haifa, while the young crowd is dancing to “Arabyon Ana” (2000) by Lebanese singer Yuri Mrakadi. The Arabic music is a testimony to a Palestinian-Arab culture that resists erasure.

The songs in Sulei…[Read more]

Although Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s experience of love undoubtedly informs the female speaker’s curative restoration in Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), the series also shows the conscious deliberation of a Victorian poet engaged in the task of renovating generic imperatives to release feminine subjectivity — which had been invalidated by t…[Read more]

Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 police procedural is, as its title suggests, intensely interested in the socioeconomic valences of spatial relationships, literalized in Yokohama’s affluent hills and its low-lying slums. The central conflict between inhabitants of these two spaces articulates this local topography into a global framework, in which con…[Read more]

This article examines how the South African film Bustin’ Bonaparte (2004) presents a
post-apartheid adaptation of Victorian colonialism in Olive Schreiner’s 1883 English novel The Story
of an African Farm. While both narratives utilize the surprising mode of play to unfold competing
racial and gender hierarchies in colonial Africa, Lis…[Read more]

This article examines how the South African film Bustin’ Bonaparte (2004) presents a
post-apartheid adaptation of Victorian colonialism in Olive Schreiner’s 1883 English novel The Story
of an African Farm. While both narratives utilize the surprising mode of play to unfold competing
racial and gender hierarchies in colonial Africa, Lis…[Read more]

The “Ilfracombe” journals, “Ex Oriente Lux,” and “A Minor Prophet” register the ways
in which George Eliot’s nineteenth-century nonfiction prose and poetry evidence
ecotheological concerns that are proto-environmental, concerns that are also
reflected in some of her novels. Employing an ecocritical methodology, this article
traces the…[Read more]

‘Modernism and Religion’ argues that modernism participated in broader processes of religious change in the twentieth century. The new prominence accorded to immanence and immediacy in religious discourse is carried over into the modernist epiphany. Modernism became mystical. The emergence of Catholic theological modernism, human rights, Christian…[Read more]

This is a revised 2023 version of a course was first taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in fall 2018. It addresses feminism, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, and critical race and ethnic studies in conjunction with translation studies.

This paper aims to analyze the depiction of pedophilia in Humayun Ahmed’s film ‘Pleasure Boy Kômola.’ It concentrates on the social and psychological reasons for this rarely existing sexual practice or perversion and the oppressive consequences it causes on the subalterns in Bangladesh during the colonial period.

This book points out new ways to identify and resolve human rights and improve the competencies of urban poor communities in Vancouver, Canada.

Cognitive science can help literary scholars formulate specific questions to be answered by archival research. This essay takes as its starting point embedded mental states (that is, mental states about mental states) and their role in generating literary subjectivity. It then follows the transformation of embedded mental states throughout several…[Read more]

This essay exemplifies a cognitive approach to literary and film studies, with particular emphasis on fictional reimagining of legal institutions. It draws on research of cognitive scientists who study metacognition—specifically, the difference between reflective and intuitive beliefs—to suggest that courtroom dramas, such as Billy Wilder’s Witne…[Read more]

This essay exemplifies a cognitive approach to literary and film studies, with particular emphasis on fictional reimagining of legal institutions. It draws on research of cognitive scientists who study metacognition—specifically, the difference between reflective and intuitive beliefs—to suggest that courtroom dramas, such as Billy Wilder’s Witne…[Read more]

An Essay about a Commonplace book assignment I wrote and tested in 2012 (published in Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy in 2014) and have since revisited and reflected upon. The essay goes into more detail about aspects of my assignment that I had not discussed in my earlier, and more practical, publication for JITP––more spe…[Read more]

Zunshine’s essay draws on recent research in developmental psychology and cognitive evolutionary anthropology to examine emotional responses to supernatural events by the child and adult characters of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816), as well as to revisit the traditional literary critical view of those responses, acc…[Read more]