The relationship between obsolescence and innovation in the digital age is a peculiar one, conveying not past and future but instead demonstrating their eternal simultaneity.

This rhetorical analysis of the phrase “The Rust Belt” asks the question Is The Rust Belt real or mythical? Does Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Subaltern’ caste now inhabit the (so-called) Rust Belt? Why can’t Rust Belt writers be heard?
“The Rust Belt” is not a title anyone living there would have chosen and yet we use it. Why? Also why should we depend…[Read more]

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]

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.

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]

The text of the job talk that I gave for my position as Head of Graduate Programs in the Scholars’ Lab at the UVA Library. The talk argued that the position as advocate for graduate students and facilitator of collaborative DH pedagogy required a person to think in terms of prepositions. Such a position requires making connections across the…[Read more]

This essay draws on cognitive literary theory to offer new ways of reading Cao Xueqin’s classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢) aka The Story of the Stone.

The Manifesto of Modern Digital Humanities is an avant-garde statement regarding digital methodologies used by scholars of modernist literature and culture. Its experimental format uses handwritten HTML to mimic the typographical qualities of modernist literary manifestoes.

Looking from a distance, as a condition of knowledge, participates within a long-standing Western tradition of power relations. This article considers the use of “distant reading” as theorized by Franco Moretti in his book by the same title and suggests that the method of literary analysis that uses such a metaphor should be aware and critical of…[Read more]

Looking from a distance, as a condition of knowledge, participates within a long-standing Western tradition of power relations. This article considers the use of “distant reading” as theorized by Franco Moretti in his book by the same title and suggests that the method of literary analysis that uses such a metaphor should be aware and critical of…[Read more]

Why We Read Fiction focuses on one of the most exciting areas of research in contemporary cognitive psychology known as “Theory of Mind” and discusses its implications for literary studies. It covers a broad range of fictional narratives, from Richardson’s Clarissa, Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Woolf’s…[Read more]