Comparative analyses of poetry by the German Sarah Kirsch, the Emirati Ahmed Rashid Thani, and the St Lucian Derek Walcott identify three distinct ecopoetic elements their work has in common. The three poets, born before the origin of ecocriticism, favour metaphors that represent natural landscapes. These metaphors express a certain…[Read more]

A brief talk for a roundtable on the centenary of Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

This course is a study of the literature of the U.S.-Mexico border from the 1980s to the present. We begin with Gloria Anzaldúa’s foundational texts, Borderlands / La Frontera, and her landmark feminist anthology, co-edited with Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Radical Writings by Women of Color. We then consider the legacies and aft…[Read more]

Birds are everywhere in nineteenth-century American literature, including the work of Emily Dickinson. Women poets often referred to their poems in terms of making songs. This essay rethinks the birds in Dickinson’s letters and poems. It suggests that Dickinson’s birds, and their songs, show her awareness of business. They exist within com…[Read more]

In an early version of his article “Harlem Literati in the Twenties,” first published in the Saturday Evening Review in 1940, Langston Hughes offers the curious suggestion that Wallace Thurman was the ghostwriter of Men, Marriage and Me (erroneously written as Men, Women and Checks in Hughes’ article), the tell-all memoir ostensibly by the origi…[Read more]

Lightning Talk from Session 393: Keywords and Keyimages in Graphic Medicine

We are hosting a happy hour to celebrate our podcast “High Theory” in conjunction with the MLA conference.
We cannot buy you a drink, but we will charm you on Zoom with silly games like theory Pictionary.
Please join us on Saturday, January 9, any time between 7 and 8 pm EST.
RSVP to info@hightheory.net or visit http://www.hightheory.net to learn…[Read more]

Paradjanov poetics of the minor – From Deleuze to Georges Bataille

High Theory is a podcast that takes on difficult ideas from the academy with irreverence. We invite you to join us for a MLA happy hour on Saturday January 9, from 7-8pm. We would love to hear your podcast ideas! Email us at info@hightheory.net or RSVP for a Zoom link on our website hightheory.net

This presentation introduces ways to use MLA Commons and Humanities Commons to curate your online presence, increase the impact of your scholarship, and tell the story of your work. It introduces profiles, sites, groups, and the CORE repository, highlighting the ways members can use these networks for collaboration, discussion, and experimentation…[Read more]

In 1879, Scots-Canadian biologist George Romanes suggested a physiological defense for working outside one’s discipline. In his essay on “Recreation,” Romanes theorized that different activities use up nutrients and energy in different muscles and parts of the brain. According to Romanes, a historian practicing science and a scientist study…[Read more]