Call for Proposals

Media, Lingualisms, Translations: Technologies of Language and Power

Conference to be held November 13-14, 2020; hosted by the School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State University, Tempe.

Keynote speakers: Jean-Noël Robert (Collège de France, Paris)
Lourdes Ortega (Georgetown University, W…[Read more]

For the “Extreme Texts” special issue of Jacket2, edited by Divya Victor (2019)

In late-ninth-century China, poetry and meditation became equated — not just metaphorically, but as two equally valid means of achieving stillness and insight. This article discusses how several strands in literary and Buddhist discourses fed into an assertion about such a unity by the poet-monk Qiji 齊己 (864–937?). One strand was the aesthet…[Read more]

The New English Dictionary was originally distinguished from an encyclopedia in reach and function by its proponent Richard Chenevix Trench and its principal editor James A. H. Murray as differing in responsibilities: a dictionary described the meanings of words, an encyclopedia described the nature of things. The distinction had philosophical and…[Read more]

Table of contents.

In the Arab world, Beckett’s plays or their adaptations have not only been popular with audiences and directors but have also inspired other literary and media genres. The Beckettian wait itself has become synonymous with the condition of the Arab person. It is a wait that offers an unrealized potential of hope that reverberates with the d…[Read more]

This review essay approaches Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature across Continents (2016) from a set of questions about what it means to read in the age of hyperarchival accumulation. Written against the background of events in the United States and elsewhere during the fall of 2017, the essay tracks and assesses Ghosh and…[Read more]

“Excellence in Execution” and “Fitness for Teaching”: Assessments of Women at the Conservatoire Américain

This essay examines the Hindi Nayī Kahānī, or New Story, Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which was influential for the short stories, criticism, and literary history that its writers produced. Incorporating a view toward the larger “metaliterary” corpus in relation to which properly “literary” nayī kahānī texts were written, the essay shows h…[Read more]

This article covers an entire generation of American popular novels published between the Civil War and World War I: campus fictions, focusing all but exclusively on homosocial scenes of undergraduate merriment. Centering on the camaraderie of fraternal sociality, campus novels model friendship as a democratic ideal for dispensing with conflict,…[Read more]

This essay argues that William Morris’s work displaces an implicit youthful bias in theories of utopia and socialism by making senescence a structuring principle of his ideal society. For Morris, capitalist age ideology stratifies the lifespan into zones of youth and old age, usefulness and excess, and he perceived the rising reformist…[Read more]

In this article I ask what happens if we consider Jewett, who spent most of her adult life at the epicenter of New England intellectual culture, as a pivotal figure in the Western history of theorizing sexuality, and her 1884 novel, A Country Doctor, as a significant document in the history of theorizing sexual and gender deviation, perfectly…[Read more]

This class asks what sex looked and felt like before the instantiation of modern identity categories such as homosexuality or heterosexuality—before, that is, our desires became an index to our souls. To this end, we’ll examine texts by nineteenth-century American writers that represent the experiences and expressions of what we now call sex…[Read more]