“A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life,” writes Vladimir Nabokov in his memoir, Speak, Memory. In our course “What is Memory?” we read and write with Nabokov’s life story using our own form of Gregory Ulmer’s “mystory” mode of writing as a way to discover the life cycles of memories–ours and our students as well…[Read more]

Editorial response to “The Coddling of the American Mind” in the September issue of “The Atlantic”

The article enacts the essay as the mainstay of scholarly discourse in a knowledgeable community. It deals with (con)textualized readings of poetry (or literature) mainly through the medium of translation as an important intercultural phenomenon involving poetics, episteme, borders.

These lesson plans and corresponding handouts introduce students to methods in digital humanities (distant reading, narrative mapping, and sentiment analysis). They are aligned with the K-12 Common Core State Standards and informed by university-level DH discourses. Developed in collaboration with high school English teachers, these materials are…[Read more]

Wikis have become enormously attractive to Internet users because they are open-access web pages or networks of web pages that can be modified by any interested editors, making them perpetual works-in-progress that evolve and change at the behest of their contributors. Wikipedia, the limitless fountain of collected, and sometimes inaccurate,…[Read more]

Designed as a short introduction to academic literary studies of affect, Reading Affect in Literary Studies is a one-credit graduate seminar, offered in Spring 2014, that was framed by the question of how we might rethink our practice as scholars of literature to take our scholarship to publics beyond the academy. Readings included work by Rita…[Read more]

Designed as a short introduction to academic literary studies of affect, Reading Affect in Literary Studies is a one-credit graduate seminar, offered in Spring 2014, that was framed by the question of how we might rethink our practice as scholars of literature to take our scholarship to publics beyond the academy. Readings included work by Rita…[Read more]

Like other forms of treachery, translation can be either concealed or exposed. Though most literary translators work in the dark and some embrace invisibility as an ideal, all translations can be situated along the continuum of illusionist-anti-illusionist or domesticating-foreignizing. A variety of paratexts lay bare the devices of translation.…[Read more]

The essay reads Ralph Waldo Emerson’s argument for a “nation of friends,” in “Politics,” as Emerson’s response to his lament, also in “Politics,” that the “power of love, as the basis of the State, has never been tried.” By a careful reading of that essay, which includes locating “Politics” within the debate in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan be…[Read more]

Blind’s autonomous cosmopolitanism is in four distinct layers. The first layer is her unusual everyday family background in the transition from Jewish tradition to the life of European revolutionaries in the 1840s and exile in Britain. The second layer is Blind’s mental and moral development under Friederike’s care and educational guidance accor…[Read more]