Fall 2019 Syllabus | SUNY Cortland

What is literature and why does it matter? How can literary texts help us think differently about the world? In this course, we will explore these and other questions through works of modern and contemporary U.S. literature. In particular, we will consider the ways resources are unevenly distributed along…[Read more]

از رویکردهای تازه در حوزۀ نقد ادبی رویکرد بوم­نقد است که به بررسی رابطۀ میان انسان و طبیعت در ادبیات می­ پردازد. هرچند تعداد قابل توجهی از آثار نظری و کاربردی در حوزۀ بوم‌نقد منتشر شده ­است، اما تاکنون توجه چندانی به پژوهش بوم­نقد تطبیقی نشده­ است. پژوهش پیش­رو تلاشی است برای گشودن باب چنین پژوهش ­هایی به زبان فارسی در فضای دانشگاهی ایران. شا…[Read more]

English abstract: A 2005 note on exaptation, a concept coined by Stephen Jay Gould, and its relationship with a famous dictum by William Gibson according to which ‘the street finds its own uses for things’. These uses can be studied only retrospectively, not prospectively or intentionally, as they are the products of history and of the contingency…[Read more]

This critical edition of Hemingway’s 1924 version of in our time is the second of three volumes for each major state of the text. Few writers have shaped the style of twentieth century prose as did Hemingway, and it all began with the “vignettes” of in our time, which have been largely unavailable for scholars and entirely out of reach for…[Read more]

This critical edition of the 1923 state of Hemingway’s In Our Time is the first of three volumes for each major state of the text. Few writers have shaped the style of twentieth century prose as did Hemingway, and it all began with the “vignettes” in The Little Review, which have been largely unavailable for scholars and entirely out of reach for…[Read more]

بخشی از مطالعات ادبی بینارشته‌ای شامل بررسی ارتباط میان ادبیات و تصویر می‌شود. در این زمینه ارتباط میان ادبیات و سینما شناخته‌شده‌ترین حوزۀ پژوهشی است که تعداد چشمگیری اثر پژوهشی، اعم از رساله و مقاله، در این حوزه نگاشته شده‌ است. در همین زمینه می‌توان به ارتباط میان ادبیات و نقاشی اشاره کرد که در سال‌های اخیر شاهد تعداد انگشت‌شماری اثر تحقیق…[Read more]

English abstract: Some observations concerning ideological issues on watching Patricia Rozema’s film ‘Mansfield Park’ (1999), based on the homonymous novel by Jane Austen—a tale of everyday life, social manners and the ethics of courtship in an English country house around 1800. ___…[Read more]

“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]

Spanish abstract: Examinamos algunos aspectos culturales de la representación de los robots y de su contraste con los humanos en dos películas basadas en la ficción narrativa de Isaac Asimov: ‘Bicentennial Man’, con Robin Williams (1999) y ‘Yo, Robot’, con Will Smith (2004).

English abstract: This paper examines some cultural aspects of the re…[Read more]

A series of sketches written in 1924 during an ocean crossing from New York to Tilbury, “Passage to England” was published only in 1998 by the Thomas Wolfe Society and is hardly Wolfe’s most popular or most accomplished work. Nonetheless I always felt that Passage to England had something unique and idiosyncratic and that despite a certain a…[Read more]

This article seeks to explore into the impact of 9/11 tragedy on the private lives of ordinary people and individuals and into the associated theme of identity crisis, as reflected in four important post-9/11 poems – “Someone Says They Looked Like Cartwheeling Birds” by Lyn Lifshin, “Making Love After September 11, 2001” by Aliki Barnstone…[Read more]

I can’t seem to forget the anecdotic episode that one of my Literature Professors used to tell the class: a deconstructionist acquaintance of theirs was so absorbed in their literal undertaking that their meals consisted only of letter-noodles soup, so that even the most mundane of tasks could intertwine itself with textuality. Farfetched as this…[Read more]

“Where do we find ourselves?” are Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Experience” first words. The query is the author’s starting point for a number of philosophical considerations; it’s also the point of departure for our making sense of pain, through the reading of both Emerson’s essay and James Joyce’s Ulysses.
The essay hipothesises that Joyce’s “We walk…[Read more]

Introduction to the literary theory, form, and style of Modernism, a literary movement that dominated the first half of the 20th century and continues to exert its influence over literature today, which, tellingly, is described by the label post-Modernism.

Introduction to the literary theory, form, and style of Modernism, a literary movement that dominated the first half of the 20th century and continues to exert its influence over literature today, which, tellingly, is described by the label post-Modernism.

This is an outline of how the Leys d’amors, a fourteenth-century troubadour treatise of huge influence on post-troubadour poetry, catalogued rhymes according to merit. It is used in my classes of 35399 Medieval Catalan Literature II, degree in Catalan Philology, at the Universitat de València (http://go.uv.es/ozQkp3H).

The Fairy Tale as Secular Scripture begins from the premise that fairy tales are a battleground in twenty-first century American culture. Hundreds of fairy tales enter the cultural space each year and are met with both acclaim and censure. Fairy tales are censured even as we consume them, but these cultural moments have been underexamined in…[Read more]

Walt Whitman, a world poet and the father of American free verse, has been received by diverse audiences from around the world. Literary and cultural scholars have studied Whitman’s interaction with social, political and literary movements of different countries. Despite his continuing presence in Iran, Whitman’s reception in this country has rem…[Read more]

Creative non-fiction/semi-academic reflective piece on seeing Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night for the first time in person at the Museum of Modern Arts.