An analysis of criticism of Charles Dickens by his contemporaries G. H. Lewes and Hippolyte Taine. Both assessments address Dickens’s popularity by relying on commonplace concepts from Victorian anthropology. However, Lewes argues for a new form of critical practice addressed to popular fiction and addresses the inadequacy of existing critical…[Read more]

This is the typescript of the Introductory chapter of the book, THE INVENTION OF RACE IN THE EUROPEAN MIDDLE AGES, published on March 8, 2018 by Cambridge UP (503 pp., 8 chapters, 10″ x 7″ format). The book discusses Jews, Muslims, Africans and blackness, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani (“Gypsies”) in 7 chapters, including a critical…[Read more]

This New Rheto rical Continuum Chart for Fiction shows a spectral range between individual (New Critical, structuralist, formalist) approach to group-based (socio-rhetorical) approach to fiction in the 21st Century.

This New Rheto rical Continuum Chart for Fiction shows a spectral range between individual (New Critical, structuralist, formalist) approach to group-based (socio-rhetorical) approach to fiction in the 21st Century.

This short piece on _Duck Soup_ (1933) and narrative theory is a response to Jim Phelan’s target essay “Authors, Resources, Audiences,” published in the double-issue of _Style_ (52.1 & 52.2).

In a time when the anxiety about Elizabeth I’s heir to the throne was ripe, and illegal to discuss, Shakespeare focuses on the issue of succession in King John, and shows the parallels to his own age, while using Hubert as a metaphor for the difficult position of Shakespeare’s contemporary citizens of England as they anticipate the naming of…[Read more]

The Stars our Destination is a story of overcoming anxieties and biases from war, as well as other growing up issues in a steel mill town. Over time, the three main characters gradually converge. Two women have nightmares involving the past and the old Prof. Daniel Blei lives off and on in a flood of troubling recollections. The conclusion will…[Read more]

A Robert Brownian Dramatic Dialogue

Whatever your theory and whatever your fandom, you don’t have to abandon it to do affect theory. This is because affect theory isn’t about telling you which side to pick in an agonistic contest; it’s about finding out what a body can do as it moves with other bodies in entangled states, whether or not we notice them. Affect theory offers more…[Read more]

Course syllabus for Eng 260: Introduction to Women Writers focused on the theme of food fiction. Taught at Central Oregon Community College as a general education course. We are on the quarter system which limits the number of readings. The course will require that students complete a collaborative digital project.

Course syllabus for Eng 260: Introduction to Women Writers focused on the theme of food fiction. Taught at Central Oregon Community College as a general education course. We are on the quarter system which limits the number of readings. The course will require that students complete a collaborative digital project.

This article examines Sphinx, the debut novel of the French novelist Anne Garréta, which was recently published in English translation in 2015. The reception of Sphinx in both French and English has focused primarily on Garréta’s virtuosic removal of gender from a love story, passing over a caricatural and crude rendering of racial difference tha…[Read more]

This article examines Sphinx, the debut novel of the French novelist Anne Garréta, which was recently published in English translation in 2015. The reception of Sphinx in both French and English has focused primarily on Garréta’s virtuosic removal of gender from a love story, passing over a caricatural and crude rendering of racial difference tha…[Read more]