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]

No creo que haya mejor ocasión que este homenaje alcalaíno al maestro Alberto Blecua para vencer las reticencias y dudas del neófito que, en palabras de Márquez Villanueva, ha de pisar por vez primera los “senderos de alto riesgo” por los que camina el Libro de buen amor. Por motivo de mi admiración y reconocimiento al homenajeado, voy a dejarme…[Read more]

Persian literature used to be visibly worldly when Persian was a lingua franca in a vast space from Balkan to China. With the British colonialism in the India and the rise of nation states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Persian lost its status and became more national in various contexts. In Iran it only got worsened with sanctions,…[Read more]

In 2000 a Stanford professor raped me. My rape is now older than I was. (I’m still not as old as he was.) The more time passes the more I’m struck by Stanford’s apathy and fecklessness about sexual violence. I wrote a letter asking Stanford to stop compounding the abuse and to reckon with its rape culture. This letter—including the “Incomp…[Read more]

This is a slightly revised version of the text of a talk that I (Seo-Young Chu) gave as part of the Fall 2014 Franke Lectures in the Humanities at Yale University. I’m sharing the text here to make the lecture more accessible. Topics include: North Korea/the DPRK, the “uncanny body politic,” the uncanny valley, “dystopian poetics,” what it means…[Read more]

For a long time, metaphors have played an important role in depicting language history. In this study, we contrast early metaphors on language history, such as the family tree or the wave model, with recent metaphors that were popularized after the quantitative turn, such as forests of trees or phylogenetic networks. Speculating about metaphors…[Read more]

Book review

In “Hwabyung Fragments” the Korean American poet Seo-Young Chu uses pieces of Korean mythology, family lore, DMZ iconography, speculative lyricism, allusions to Plato’s Symposium (the figure of one’s missing other half), and allusions to chimerism, mosaicism, and twinning to explore generational trauma, Korean division, postmemory han, the…[Read more]

A pesar que puga semblar una mica pueril, crec que he de començar aquest treball amb una asseveració rotunda: el Cancionero general no es va editar a València per casualitat. Les edicions de 1511 i 1514 no van ser solament el resultat del moltes vegades problemàtic pelegrinatge vital dels erudits literaris de l’època que, com Hernando del Castil…[Read more]

El 22 de desembre de 1509, l‘erudit castellà Hernando del Castillo, el mercader genovés Lorenzo Ganoto i l’impressor Cristóbal Cofman firmaven a la ciutat de València, davant el notari Joan Casanova, el contracte de la primera edició del Cancionero general, que va veure la llum finalment l’any 1511. En esència, la distribució del treball era…[Read more]

El presente trabajo presenta un panorama de síntesis biográfica con respecto a los poetas valencianos presentes en el Cancionero general de Hernando del Castillo. Asimismo, los poemas que contienen temas típicos de Valencia también son analizados, con el objetivo de estimular un mayor conocimiento de los hombres y la ciudad en cuyo entorno cul…[Read more]

Early Modern Spanish literature, also known as Golden Age Spanish literature, is a well-established period in the History of Spanish literary tradition, covering from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century, from Renaissance to Baroque works. In the case of poetry, the stylistic change from one aesthetic to the…[Read more]

There is nothing like a firmly established typology of dreams – simply because the taxonomies on which existing typologies are based vary widely: They can be oneirocritical, thematic, or based on dreaming characters or their responses, on narratological functions, etc. The essays in this volume will discuss a broad range of dream types, with a s…[Read more]

Num dos envelopes do espólio pessoano, encontram-se 56 folhas dactilografadas, quase sem emendas, com o que aparenta ser boa parte de uma peça teatral em inglês. O problema: não há indicação de título, nem de autor. Será um inédito de Fernando Pessoa? Uma tradução inglesa de uma peça olvidada de outro dramaturgo português? Num momento em qu…[Read more]

Stock theft has long been a problem along the Lesotho–South Africa border. From Moshoeshoe I’s cattle-raiding in the nineteenth century through to the start of the democratic era in Lesotho (1993) and South Africa (1994), the idea that stock theft is both prevalent and an international problem has been generally accepted by one and all. This art…[Read more]