attempt to bring the horrors of the indo-china war to the most intimate part of women, 1967, xuan loc, rvn

The purpose of this graduate course is to examine key texts of the twentieth century that established the fundamental connection between language structures and practices on the one hand, and the formation of selfhood and subjectivity, on the other. In particular, the course will focus on theories that emphasize the role of formal elements in…[Read more]

For an MLA panel, January 2016, this talk recalls the 2014 crisis at the University of Virginia about an alleged fraternity gang rape, discusses the policy on sexual assault that designates “responsible employees,” and proposes measures: change drinking laws; avoid segregating any space by identity; offer responsible parties. Humanities professors…[Read more]

English 3307 equips students for critical encounters with the texts and literary materials that constitute the social, political and scientific context of the twentieth century in North America and Europe. Organized around the theme of the fantastic in speculative fiction, the course delves into enduring tensions in Western cultural traditions,…[Read more]

Selected works from the literatures of former European colonies: African, Indian, Caribbean, Australian, Canadian, Latin American, etc. Colonialism waned in the 1940s through 60s amidst decolonization movements, yet globalization flourished in often unnoticed, hegemonic pathways. Considering cultural products of this moment leads us to ask what…[Read more]

discussion of the may 2004 issue of pmla that treated science fiction as a scholarly genre. my question was, instead of writing strung-out, dystopian lit, why not ask what will be the level of consciousness of an individual human biped in a galactic economy of quadrilions and quintillions of people, each utilizing near- infinity numbers of…[Read more]

Previous scholarship on source materials for Lawrence Durrell’s Gnostic themes in Monsieur are insufficient in light of his marginalia in Serge Hutin’s Les Gnostiques and his notebooks for the novel. We contend that archival evidence from the Bibliothèque Lawrence Durrell in Nanterre, France, necessitates a reevaluation of previous work in orde…[Read more]

Virginia Woolf’s well known distaste for the generic and aesthetic instability of Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) finds echoes in more recent responses, even as the novel remains an anchor of a lesbian literary canon. I demonstrate that Hall’s novel does indeed exhibit generic and psychological instability, as a Victo…[Read more]

Syllabus for an advanced graduate course on realism and the Victorian novel taught at Temple University in Fall 2015.

Between 1988 and 1994 American comic books engaged the politics, problematics, and crises of the AIDS epidemic by injecting the virus and its social, cultural, and epidemiological effects on gay men into the four-color fantasies of the superhero genre. As the comic-book industry was undergoing major internal changes that allowed for more mature,…[Read more]

The humanities must work together with STEM if we are to succeed in articulating relevant, historically informed, and culturally nuanced responses to grand challenges.

In his introduction to Mourid Barghouti novel, I saw Ramallah, Edward Said refers to the Palestinians as a displaced and a misplaced people. Regardless of the nationalities they carry or countries they live in, they carry with them the trauma of events that led to the loss of their homeland, and the grief of this loss and endless displacement.…[Read more]

Unlike his earlier novels, J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, has not received the attention that it deserves from the critics. The novel, which is set in Russia not only draws on real aspects of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s life but also on certain events in the Russian author’s novels, specifically The Devils. Coetzee’s Dostoevsky is an aging a…[Read more]

Although Plato’s Utopia or ideal city is the non-place that holds the promise of perfection, it remains the place in which citizens are categorized by a rigid structure. José Saramago, on the other hand, introduces us to a dystopia in his novel Blindness, in which one event leads to the ruin of a city. Yet, as with Plato’s Utopia, a similar…[Read more]