In his address at the Madrid Peace Conference, the Head of the Palestinian Delegation, Dr Haidar Abdul-Shafi challenged the persistent myth that has defined Palestinian existence for at least a century by saying: “For too long the Palestinian people have gone unheeded, silenced […] we have been victimized by the myth of ‘a land witho…[Read more]

“Carbon and Conferences (Again)” offers one person’s experience of trying to get to the Austin MLA conference by a means other than airplanes. It asks fellow MLA members for more collective, mindful attention to the carbon footprint of the conference generally. While acknowledging the intellectual and personal joy in face to face encounters, it…[Read more]

This, the first critical collection on Delarivier Manley, revisits the most heated discussions and adds new perspectives that will change the conversation on the foremost woman writer in the age of Queen Anne. This compilation demonstrates the wide range of thinking about Manley’s literary production and significance. While contributors r…[Read more]

This paper argues that there is a need to look beyond what is merely “homeward” in the work of Thomas Wolfe. I take up Wai Chee Dimock’s expansive conception of American literature as “a crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures,” demonstrating how Thomas…[Read more]

Technology is transforming twenty-first century education. Central to the study of English Literature is critical thinking and writing, and with the advent of digital texts (along with the precursor – digitized writing) the space of the discipline continues to expand. One way to get at what is being done in the study of literature is to explore…[Read more]

Kafka’s last short story: Josephine die Saengerin – as translated by Phillip Lundberg. Copyright Free translation as stated on the copyright page of Essential Kafka.

n his address at the Madrid Peace Conference, the Head of the Palestinian Delegation, Dr Haidar Abdul-Shafi challenged the persistent myth that has defined Palestinian existence for at least a century by saying: “For too long the Palestinian people have gone unheeded, silenced […] we have been victimized by the myth of ‘a land without a peopl…[Read more]

Syllabus for an advanced graduate course on realism and the Victorian novel taught at Temple University in Fall 2015.

Exploring the transnational dimension of literary modernism and its increasing centrality to our understanding of 20th-century literary culture, Modernism in a Global Context surveys the key issues and debates central to the ‘global turn’ in contemporary Modernist Studies.
Topics covered include:
– Transnational literary exchange
-…[Read more]

A reflection on MLA 16 from the adjunct perspective.

If Jane Austen had wanted to write about zombies, what might she have known about the walking dead in the early nineteenth century? In this 2010 presidential address for EC/ASECS, subsequently published in the society’s newsletter, I examine this question and take a look at Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

Using Geertz’s Verstehen/ Einfühlen distinction, this essay begins with an overview of the travel writing and anthropological work about Oman, concentrating on the southern region of Dhofar. The author then situates Wilfred Thesiger’s classic Arabian Sands (1959) within these two genres as an example of a writer who is able to show unde…[Read more]

In an essay entitled “Digital Blake,” J. Hillis-Miller (2006) asks a question which dominates discussions of William Blake’s relationship to New Media: “[w]ould Blake have approved of the William Blake Archive?” (p29). The Archive has itself been the focus of enormous theoretical reflection. The “Articles about the Archive” section on the Archive…[Read more]