Death drives the contemporary American novel and its market in the late-20th and early 21st-century. To help illustrate this, we consider Don DeLillo’s White Noise from 1985 and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road from 2006 for something that Walter Benjamin — famously quoted as saying “Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell” — ma…[Read more]

This brief presentation gives a basic overview of the Islamic afterlife, focusing both on its variations from Judeo-Christian concepts and its varied understandings within the faith.

This dissertation presents an alternative history of late medieval literature, one which traces the development of Chinese Buddhist poetry into a fully autonomous tradition. It does so through a careful study of the works of poet-monks in the late medieval period (760–960). These poet-monks established a tradition of elite Buddhist poetry in c…[Read more]

Examining gay journalism as gay liberation literature, this essay forwards a cultural history of sexuality informed by comparative urban and queer studies. My main argument is that gay liberation literature under apartheid lags behind important shifts in sexual activism; and my larger aim is to extend the valences of postcolonial queer studies…[Read more]

The historical novel Waking the Dead is now available at ResearchGate. This data file (there are 20) introduces Jane Addams

Round Table on Diversity and Teaching Medieval Studies sponsored by Graduate Student Council. Session title: “Tearing Down Walls, Building Bridges:
Medieval Diversity and Cross-Cultural Encounters in Syllabus Design and Teaching.” This paper is about two courses that illustrate the principle “Diversity in Every Course Title” and several…[Read more]

The Trump presidency has fueled growing apprehension about a media landscape rife with lies, bogus news, and conspiracy theories. These concerns can be situated within a discourse of archival silence which questions the ways in which knowledge may be concealed, misappropriated and exploited in the service of governments, corporations and…[Read more]

The Trump presidency has fueled growing apprehension about a media landscape rife with lies, bogus news, and conspiracy theories. These concerns can be situated within a discourse of archival silence which questions the ways in which knowledge may be concealed, misappropriated and exploited in the service of governments, corporations and…[Read more]

Shakespearean tragedies and comedies have been adapted to the silver screen in India, Malaysia, Tibet, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, and Japan. How do Shakespeare and modern directors talk to each other across cultural and historical divides? Why are particular strategies used or themes emphasized? How are pre-linguistic structures of spectacle and…[Read more]

Dany Laferrière’s first novel, Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre was a literary sensation when it was first released in Quebec in the mid-80s. The author/narrator plays with reader’s expectations, presenting both a stereotypical image of the black man (sex-obsessed, white-hating) and one that contradicts and upsets their expectations. Influen…[Read more]

Dany Laferrière’s first novel, Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre was a literary sensation when it was first released in Quebec in the mid-80s. The author/narrator plays with reader’s expectations, presenting both a stereotypical image of the black man (sex-obsessed, white-hating) and one that contradicts and upsets their expectations. Influen…[Read more]

An analysis of the collaboration between Peter Miller and Louis Dudek in the translation of Anne Hébert’s poem, The Tomb of Kings.

Author Dany Laferrière, after a seven year hiatus from writing, produced the book Je suis un écrivain japonais (2008) [I am a Japanese Writer]. The title recalls statements he has frequently made in interviews about how much he hates being pigeon-holed by national or racial labels. The book itself is an examination of what (or who) defines s…[Read more]

This essay examines the uneasy relationship that Arturo Islas’s The Rain God has had with narratives of identity, focusing on how the representation of Felix’s sexuality makes him a problematic figure for certain strains of Chicana/o and queer studies. In other writings, Islas criticizes Quinto Sol, the chief publishing house of Chicano literature…[Read more]

“Oración vindicativa del honor de las letras y de los literatos” (1763) del dominico poblano Cristóbal Mariano Coriche es un ensayo novohispano que nace como respuesta a un discurso cuyo supuesto autor era nada menos que Jean Jacques Rousseau. En este discurso se sostenía que el trabajo intelectual desarrollado en distintas etapas históricas hab…[Read more]

City Botany: Reading Urban Ecologies in China through Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke

Lecture/class notes on Herbert Marcuse’s Essay on Authority. I’m sharing my teaching notes (rough) for works that may be helpful to others and are widely taught.