Archives & Networks of Modernism developed without any single authorial focus to address or collapse the plurality of Modernist and Late Modernist networks and archives. The collection instead adopts an international perspective, in particular where each network or archive intersects or interrupts the other. In this, it draws from the established…[Read more]

The British and Canadian authors Lawrence Durrell and M. G. Vassanji do not, at first thought, call out for a comparative study. Neither are typically regarded in criticism through their origins or ethnicity. The focus instead goes to their characters and subject matter, their cosmopolitan experiences. Confusions surrounding both authors have…[Read more]

This piece provides a detailed engagement with Don DeLillo’s depiction of the 2003 Iraq war in his latest novel, Point Omega. Framed through both formal aesthetic signposting of the interrelations between modernist and postmodernist practice and also through explicit thematic comparison between the conflicts, I trace DeLillo’s treatment of Iraq in…[Read more]

In his article “Queering Masturbation in Lorde’s Life and Writing” Eric Sipyinyu Njeng discusses masturbation in Audre Lorde’s life and works to signal an important aspect of her oeuvre often neglected in scholarship. Lorde stands out among prominent queer queens by demonstrating theory corporeally thereby…[Read more]

This piece presents a tripartite analysis of the relationship between the philosophical works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the novels of Thomas Pynchon. This is broadly structured around three schools of Wittgenstein scholarship identified by Guy Kahane et al. as the Orthodox Tractatus, the New Wittgenstein, and several strands of the Orthodox…[Read more]

This piece explores the resonances between the depiction of the Cold War and the War Against Terror in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day and Don DeLillo’s Underworld.

This piece effects a critical revision of the interactions between late Foucault and the works of Thomas Pynchon through the theme of Enlightenment, a relationship far more nuanced than granted by current appraisals. Examining resistance, revolution, and the critical attitude alongside a focus on the Foucauldian sphere of ethics, this work posits…[Read more]

Jennifer Egan’s acclaimed 2010 novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, is a text populated by a disproportionately high number of, often unfulfilled, postgraduate researchers: “I’m in the PhD program at Berkeley”, proclaims Mindy; “Joe, who hailed from Kenya […] was getting his PhD in robotics at Columbia”; “Bix, who’s black, is spending his ni…[Read more]

This chapter extends the focus of wartime trauma scholarship to recognise female
non-combatants’ variants of traumatic victimisation and agency, as presented in the
Middle Eastern and African contexts. The agency of such actors, who suffered
tragically from the traumas of war, was inexplicably overlooked in both Middle
Eastern and African l…[Read more]

“The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”—a two-part article—questions the widely held belief in critical race theory that “race” is a category without purchase before the modern era. Surveying a variety of cultural documents from the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries—chronicles, hagiography, literature, stories, sculpture, maps, canon l…[Read more]

This article considers the performances of “animal drag” that appear across the affiliated US media projects of Jackass (the television program and film franchise) and Wildboyz (the television program). Drawing on transgender studies scholarship, as well as recent work in affect theory, animal studies, and environmental studies, Nicole Seymour arg…[Read more]

This article reads South African science-fiction writer Lauren Beukes’s first novel, Moxyland (2008) set in a futuristic Cape Town, from the perspective of Lindsay Bremner’s notion of “citiness”– or how cities produce the modernity of the subjects who inhabit them. The novel is remarkable for its dependence on the social geography of the South A…[Read more]

This article reads South African science-fiction writer Lauren Beukes’s first novel, Moxyland (2008) set in a futuristic Cape Town, from the perspective of Lindsay Bremner’s notion of “citiness”– or how cities produce the modernity of the subjects who inhabit them. The novel is remarkable for its dependence on the social geography of the South A…[Read more]

Although Flannery O’Connor’s fiction has been subjected to criticism of all types and although she is known for her interest in religious matters, no one prior to this has done an in-depth study on the presentation of conversion in her fiction. With William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience as a basis for both definition and struc…[Read more]

The influx of Vietnamese refugees, ‘‘boat people,’’ and immigrants into the United States after April 1975 has led to the establishment of a significant Vietnamese-American community. There is a body of literature written for children and young adults that creates and delineates this new community within the topography of a welcoming and immigra…[Read more]

An examination of crime and criminality in colonial and postcolonial India through life-writing and the examples of Thugs and Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen.

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]

This article considers Marıa Lugones’s concept of faithful witnessing as a point of departure to think about the ethics and possibilities of faithful witnessing in literary contexts. For Lugones, faithful witnessing is an act of aligning oneself with oppressed peoples against the grain of power and recognizing their humanity, oppression, and re…[Read more]

n his theoretical writings, as well as in the subtext of The Waste Land, Eliot expresses the idea of the organic nature of culture and its unity despite its regional diversity. This unity is represented by some formal features of The Waste Land, such as its rhythm and structure. However, cultural unity, at times also represented by the textual, is…[Read more]