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]

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]

W. G. Sebald and Patrick Modiano are two contemporary authors who share similar themes and literary practices. They are both fastidiously or even obsessively historical in their narrative development. And they seem preoccupied with the sins of World War II. Critics have divided feelings about their accomplishments. Skeptics say their trauma…[Read more]

W. G. Sebald and Patrick Modiano are two contemporary authors who share similar themes and literary practices. They are both fastidiously or even obsessively historical in their narrative development. And they seem preoccupied with the sins of World War II. Critics have divided feelings about their accomplishments. Skeptics say their trauma…[Read more]

Powerpoint presentation for the MLA2020 collaborative roundtable “Digital Humanities in Japan and Korea: Approaches and Challenges,” organized by the LLC Korean and LLC Japanese since 1900 Forums. This brief introduction to “Re-Envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in 20th Century Visual and Material Culture” was one of seven presentations by…[Read more]

Powerpoint presentation for the MLA2020 collaborative roundtable “Digital Humanities in Japan and Korea: Approaches and Challenges,” organized by the LLC Korean and LLC Japanese since 1900 Forums. This brief introduction to “Re-Envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in 20th Century Visual and Material Culture” was one of seven presentations by…[Read more]

This paper is about an ongoing experiment in ecocriticism that trades the reference to oikos–the inhabited world–for a choreography ushering bodies that cannot exist together anymore as a public through their resurrection to collective existence at the hand of three-dimensional replicas of prehistoric caves: Chauvet II and Lascaux IV. What the…[Read more]

Since the 1960s, Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña has developed an internationally-recognized body of hybrid works that draw on poetry, painting, sculpture, installation, dance, song, and film. “Reading as Ritual Response” considers one of Vicuña’s lesser-known categories of work, the artist’s book, through which she harnesses the visual, m…[Read more]

Since the 1960s, Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña has developed an internationally-recognized body of hybrid works that draw on poetry, painting, sculpture, installation, dance, song, and film. “Reading as Ritual Response” considers one of Vicuña’s lesser-known categories of work, the artist’s book, through which she harnesses the visual, m…[Read more]