This article takes up the insurrection in Washington DC, and the paranoid politics of QAnon. It analyzes the gamification of paranoia across QAnon and related paranoid publics, tracking such gamification as a political-economic demand generated by neoliberalism. Taking seriously Sigmund Freud’s insight that delusional formations are attempts at…[Read more]

An innovative account that brings together cognitive science, ethnography, and literary history to examine patterns of “mindreading” in a wide range of literary works.

A review article focused on phenomenological method and Christian thought in Marie-Aimée Manchon’s book _Alentour du verses: Petite phénoménologie des Mystère_ (Ad Solem, 2019).

The Gulf Stream gained scientific prominence in the nineteenth century as a test case for theories about the dynamics of ocean currents and the equilibrium of transatlantic climate. Discourse about the current supplied descriptions, analogies, and myths that persist into the present. Triangulating oceanic, ecological, and transatlantic approaches…[Read more]

A sharply critical response to Shelby Steele’s first book, The Content of Our Character.

This essay focuses on Olive Schreiner’s personal correspondence and the allegories collected in Dreams (1890) to explore her complicated relationship to late-Victorian Decadence. I argue that Schreiner modified Decadent writers’ use of intersensoriality and synaesthesia to educate her readers into a new kind of common sense, one aligned with her…[Read more]

For the past twenty years, scholars of world and global history and literature have shown that the early modern world was a complex, entangled place. And yet, by emphasizing connection, such work at times overlooks the many separations that drove the engines of global early modernity: transoceanic slave trades, tribute labor, and the economic…[Read more]

Gene Wolfe, living though Severian, re-experiences via Thecla’s characterization of him as not being worth enough to value highly for being what he thought he could only amount to her when he first met her, that is, simply a boy at hand, his own once being lured into the attentions’ of his mother and then dismissed by her when she was done usi…[Read more]

Gene Wolfe, living though Severian, re-experiences via Thecla’s characterization of him as not being worth enough to value highly for being what he thought he could only amount to her when he first met her, that is, simply a boy at hand, his own once being lured into the attentions’ of his mother and then dismissed by her when she was done usi…[Read more]

Canon, tradition, and origin anchor developmental accounts of Black literary history, describing the forward movement from a singular beginning in terms of birth, maturation, and inheritance. This model delimits a specialized field of study, but also obscures texts, practices, and archives that do not cohere with it. In the study of slave…[Read more]

Building on the film philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, this essay develops a queer naturalist account of film form centered on the ontogenetic dimensions of Lars von Trier’s film Nymphomaniac (2013).

Scholars who have studied the contested meaning of “creole” in Louisiana have
typically maintained that the “Creole myth,” that is the strategic redefinition of
the term “creole” to refer to the white descendants of Louisiana’s original French
and Spanish settlers, emerged during or shortly after the Civil War. Drawing on
a newspaper art…[Read more]

Published in New Orleans in 1845 by a group of free men of color, Les Cenelles: Choix de poésies indigènes is now commonly recognized as the first collection of African American poetry. As a testament to and expression of the intellectual prowess of New Orleans’s francophone free Black community, Les Cenelles deserves to be read as a formally int…[Read more]

The connection between philosophy and real or everyday language belongs to Wordsworth’s early poetic vision. My interest in Wordsworth’s dialogue with philosophical thinking leads me to turn neither to studies tracing the varied philosophic influences on his poetics nor to those examining the influence of his collaborator Coleridge on his ear…[Read more]