This essay argues that curiosity can work as irony’s shadow dialectic in modernist responses to imperialism and metropolitan culture, and suggests that curiosity deserves further exploration as a modernist device. Attentive to the settings and visual metaphors of space and structure that abet irony’s role, this essay finds that curiosity’s…[Read more]

372 [HUM] 19th Century Literature of the British Empire and the Americas. 3 credit hours. Literary and cultural texts in English from 1800 to 1900 focusing on global British literature and literatures of the Americas.

My investment in the course.
I am concerned about our country’s inability to work against climate change, the mass i…[Read more]

In this paper we present a statistical method for inferring historical social networks from biographical documents as well as the scholarly aims for doing so. Existing scholarship on historical social networks is scattered across an unmanageable number of disparate books and articles. A researcher interested in how persons were connected to one…[Read more]

This article discusses changes that Mary Kingsley made to her 1897 Travels in West Africa when she abridged the text for a general audience.

This paper describes approaches I use to teach Shakespeare’s The Tempest using intertextuality in the undergraduate introductory literature course.

In THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, a cozening knight and a jealous husband assume without question the availability of female bodies to adulterous liaisons, revealing their confidence in the cultural narrative of female inconstancy. Falstaff attempts to write a story in which he is the recipient of the wives’ sexual and economic favors. Ford, like T…[Read more]

Shakespeare’s MACBETH interrogates the tyranny of absolute monarchical practices and divorces them from naturalized gender constructions by placing Lady Macbeth at the center of the play’s violence. I argue that she provides a parodic inversion of the ideal wife and and puts pressure on masculinist and violent structures of relations that depend…[Read more]

The English Department at U.C. Berkeley has developed two multimedia humanities websites at “Shakespeare’s Staging” and “Milton Revealed,” illustrating classic rewards and problems in digital humanities programs. Users are uniformly positive about the simple, selective, and fully organized structure. Visits are numerous, averaging 200-400 p…[Read more]

Shakespearean tragedies have played an important part in modern and contemporary East Asian engagements with Western cultures. Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Singaporean translations, rewritings, films, and theatre productions have three important shared characteristics, namely hybridization of genres, intra-regional and trans-historical…[Read more]

Dickens, in his infatuation with the orphan, anticipates Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which argues against interpreting everyone’s life experience in terms of the Oedipal conflict’s family drama.

Title of short story: WHITING RICH AND STRANGE

A story of ethnic people in an oil refinery town in NW Indiana.
Comments are most welcome. This is part of a series of stories based in the industrial part of Chicago’s Indiana suburbs.

I am also placing the story in the Shakespeare group because–after all–it is a Romeo and Juliet story.…[Read more]