Syllabus and Course Reader (Creative Commons Licensed) of survey course of premodern Hispanic literature and culture taught as a series of debates on social questions (see https://davidwacks.uoregon.edu/2017/12/14/survey4/)

Course description: This class introduces students to a variety of texts written in Spain and the New World from 1100-1600…[Read more]

Reading of two medieval Spanish ballads featuring fairies in light of ethnographic evidence of fairy consciousness in Spain

Syllabus for a graduate-level course with the following overview: “We will examine how theoretical discourse has evolved through shifting technological platforms, with particular attention to the challenges software, code, and networks present to our understanding of texts. We will engage with examples of complex procedural works ranging from…[Read more]

The Stage 3 revision sets up the Theory Palette with hues and tones of green (author, history, and nature), yellow (culture), purple (psyche), grey (text), red (reader), dark blue (literature), light blue (language), rose (embodiment/perception), and hot pink (intersectional feminisms).

Airbrush and pencil tools suggest color blending without…[Read more]

A clean copy of the Theory Palette http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6581T, this (almost) blank canvas is open to artistic and textual interventions, variations, and compositions with the intersecting concerns of author, history, culture, psyche, text, reader, literature, language, and embodiment/perception as blendable paint colors.

Evoking the creative messiness of an artist’s palette, this Theory Palette depicts nine theoretical concerns as intersecting, blendable paint colors: author, history, culture, psyche, text, reader, literature, language, and embodiment/perception. Just as painters in the same school, theorists blend colors to create their own compositions, s…[Read more]

An essay on autobiography in pop songs by women: http://www.theavidlistener.com/2014/12/singing-about-yourself-autobiography-in-pop-music.html

Very short essay on the way Deleuze uses images in his book on Bacon. In the original French edition, the images are in a separate volume; he does that in order to mime, or enact, the theory of sensation in his text. It seems to me this is an unusual and promising strategy for art history (disposing images so their sequence and arrangement…[Read more]

Research on global Shakespeare has focused on the ways in which the plays have been adapted for indigenous languages and customs. Less attention has been paid to the ways in which non-British directors have treated the Elizabethan drama. Yet there are a number of works that create direct musical dialogues between Elizabethan drama, history, and…[Read more]

In this paper I look at how “Exenplo XI” is both product and reflection of the various traditions and cultures of medieval Iberia and how Juan Manuel forges a new version of this story from these inherited traditions in order to showcase problems of concern to his fourteenth-century audience, namely, the tension between ecclesiastical and And…[Read more]

This study imagines a Sephardic archive not as a physical site that houses the artifacts, texts, and history of a nation-state or Empire, but one that allows us to access those objects (or exposes their absence) and to bring artifacts from different official archives into dialogue in a different, virtual space, thus creating an additional, but not…[Read more]

Nigerian authors have consistently and effectively critiqued insidious connections between
masculinity, political power, religious fundamentalism, and capitalist interests. The unstable
political structures in Nigeria since the 1970s have led to such critiques. This essay deploys the
idea of polygamy in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the S…[Read more]

As part of my research, I argue that one important way the definition of a feminist borderland develops in these narratives is from a female character’s knowledge of and interpretation of her physical presence within the borderlands. By applying Linda Martín Alcoff’s theories of gender “positionality” and “self-embodiment” from her text Visible…[Read more]

This paper presents the state of the art regarding questions such as: How much do we know about the continuity of Latin in Northwest Africa between the 5th and the 10th centuries? How well do we know Afro-Romanic? Could we determine some basic linguistic features of Afro-Romanic and, if yes, which ones? Which data are consistent with the presence…[Read more]

This paper presents the state of the art regarding questions such as: How much do we know about the continuity of Latin in Northwest Africa between the 5th and the 10th centuries? How well do we know Afro-Romanic? Could we determine some basic linguistic features of Afro-Romanic and, if yes, which ones? Which data are consistent with the presence…[Read more]

This paper presents the state of the art regarding questions such as: How much do we know about the continuity of Latin in Northwest Africa between the 5th and the 10th centuries? How well do we know Afro-Romanic? Could we determine some basic linguistic features of Afro-Romanic and, if yes, which ones? Which data are consistent with the presence…[Read more]

The complexity of Medieval Iberia’s linguistic, religious, and cultural diversity is a commonplace. Descriptions abound of the lands that are now modern Spain and Portugal as a “melting pot” or a “multicultural” space. However, modern literary history, with its tendency toward monolingual, national narratives, has produced a vision of medieval…[Read more]

Readings of literary texts are always shaped by a reader’s particular location and knowledge, but those locations are themselves defined by their histories. Romeo and Juliet has inspired new sets of allegorical vocabularies of history in locations without confrontations with the English heritage in colonial contexts. Why is the reading of a c…[Read more]

Abstract: This paper investigates the shifting definitions of the term gāthā (Ch. ji) over an 800-year period, from the earliest sūtratranslations into Chinese until the mid-tenth century. Although the term originally referred to the verse sections of scriptures, gāthās soon began to circulate separately, used in ritual, contemplative, and peda…[Read more]