This paper is a critical examination of two antithetical theories on the role of authorial intention in the criticism and interpretation of literature: the New Critics’ “intentional fallacy” and E. D. Hirsch’s historicist objectivism. A third way is put forward: a regulative objectivism which emerges as a a result of critical debate.

Proposal for Book ‘Em: Libraries, Librarians, and Information in Mystery Fiction, 1970-2018

This paper argues that in The Farming of Bones, Edwidge Danticat seeks to historicize and memorialize the Parsley Massacre through the reframing of the historical event through Amabelle Désir’s fictional account. Through the conflation of historical artifact and literary imagination, the novel narrates, and therefore produces, a collective me…[Read more]

I look to the ways material text studies might be prompted by, and improve upon, thinking in new materialism. The result is that paper could be read for how histories and narratives seep into the paper record and require accounts of agentic materiality lest they be lost or muted. In what follows, I use stories about rag paper as points of…[Read more]

This paper articulates a model for examining medieval vernacular multi-text codices which
is based on the dynamics we see in the contemporary use of social media, particularly
personal blogs. Both media democratise the use of an existing specialised technology,
accelerate the development of this technology, and serve as vehicles for the…[Read more]

An examination of images of protest signs carried at Women’s March protest marches in the United States on January 21, 2017, reveals that these signs are certainly visual arguments, and that they represent a new and cogent extension of fourth-wave feminism that attempts to address a variety of feminist concerns that is dependent on social media o…[Read more]

The link between asimovian universe and Sherlock Holmes

The late Victorian era was imbued with progressive scientific reform and palpable anxiety regarding the future of the British empire. These two topics may seem distinct, but they find mutual expression in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, in which the soulless Count travels from Transylvania (literally, “beyond the forest”) and invades Engla…[Read more]

gender & Judaism in A Serious Man [Coen Bros, 2009], An American Dream [Norman Mailer, 1965] and the Pericope Adulterae.

Our work in this course will center around two questions. First, what were the material and social conditions for Black men, women, and children living in the territory that would become the United States, from roughly 1750 until on or about 1860? While slavery is likely the first concept that comes to mind, additional concepts such as racism,…[Read more]