This course is a study of the literature of the U.S.-Mexico border from the 1980s to the present. We begin with Gloria Anzaldúa’s foundational texts, Borderlands / La Frontera, and her landmark feminist anthology, co-edited with Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color. We then consider the legacies and aft…[Read more]

Review of Ellen D. Haskell, Mystical Resistance: Uncovering the Zohar’s Conversations with Christianity (Oxford UP 2016), originally published in Speculum 94.4 (2019), 1167–1168.

“A frightful hobgoblin stalks through Europe. We are haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Communism.” This epigraph comes from the 1850 translation of The Communist Manifesto by Helen Macfarlane, and this special feature in The New Americanist assumes that a similarly frightful hobgoblin stalks through genre fiction, too. Fantasy as a genre is haunted…[Read more]

Hi ha concepte que semblen diàfans, però que poden tornar-se ambigus quan hi reflexionem amb atenció, com el de la violència. Si bé actualment aquest terme envaeix el nostre espai i sovint el llegim de manera unívoca, en el moment en què hi aprofundim hem de reconsiderar-ne el significat. Així mateix, la identitat, que ha estat el tema nuclear…[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]

The historical relationship between the Catalan and Occitan languages had a definitive impact on the linguistic identity of the powerful Crown of Aragon and the emergent Spanish Empire. Drawing upon a wealth of historical documents, linguistic treatises and literary texts, this book offers fresh insights into the political and cultural forces that…[Read more]

La relación histórica entre las lenguas catalana y occitana tuvo un impacto decisivo en la formación de la identidad lingüística de la Corona de Aragón y, más tarde, en la del Imperio Español. Basándose en una gran variedad de documentos históricos, tratados lingüísticos y textos literarios, y mediante un análisis textual innovador, el presente…[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]