Have cognitive scientists misread autism? What happens if, instead of simply accepting such research, literary critics turned to the actual prose and poetry written by autistic authors, such as Tito Mukhopadhyay and Donna Williams? Literary theory may never be the same once it comes to terms with neurodiversity.

Editor’s Introduction to Pied Piper of Lovers. Durrell’s first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, was published in 1935, shortly after he left England to live abroad until his death in 1990. As an autobiographical Künstlerroman, it traces Walsh Clifton’s Anglo-Indian childhood and his struggles to negotiate a life between “mother” India and “father”…[Read more]

Studying William Blake means studying the event of history, the way history merges with and emerges within theology, politics and philosophy. William Blake’s poetry has had a precarious relationship with history; his work resonates from very specific historical concerns and yet also seems to struggle against being confined to any formal h…[Read more]

This conference paper was an invited plenary lecture for the 11th annual meeting of ICEG in January 2014. It builds upon numerous articles, essays and books the author has published on the grammar, epistemology and socio-historical aspects of metaphor and metaphorical discourse. This paper provides a model for understanding metaphor as a needed…[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]

his essay positions the use of machine learning within the digital humanities as part of a wider movement that nostalgically seeks to return literary criticism to the structuralist era, to a moment characterized by belief in systems, structure, and the transparency of language. It argues that the scientific criticism of the present attempts to…[Read more]

This piece presents a tripartite analysis of the relationship between the philosophical works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the novels of Thomas Pynchon. This is broadly structured around three schools of Wittgenstein scholarship identified by Guy Kahane et al. as the Orthodox Tractatus, the New Wittgenstein, and several strands of the Orthodox…[Read more]