This chapter explores an early instance of the use of a course blog in an upper-level undergraduate literature course, including the challenges faced by both students and instructor.

This chapter explores the Infinite Summer reading project, in which a group of bloggers read and discussed David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in dialogue with one another and with a wide readership, arguing that such social reading projects present the potential for developing crucial kinds of ethical human connection (of which the novel depicts…[Read more]

This paper explores the literary potential of the personal blog, arguing that the form may usefully understood in relationship to the early novel. As it has been argued that the representations of individual characters in the early novel helped to bring the modern understanding of the individual into being, so this paper argues that the character…[Read more]

Gay black representations of the phallus subvert recognizable images of the gay/black phallus, and they draw on a tradition, however brief, of writers who have also possessed and spoken from the gay/black phallus. In thus circumventing symbolic castration,
Saint’s progeny effectively engage in a tentative yet decidedly agentive elaboration of gay…[Read more]

The decline of the language requirement in English doctoral programs will have to be reversed if those in the English profession are to treat global and ethnic studies seriously, to refuse to replicate “spread-eagle” isolationism in their work, to research and teach world literature and English-language literature’s place in it responsibly, and t…[Read more]

Because academic freedom is a function of and entrusted to the corporate faculty, defenses of academic freedom must be articulated in the terms of curricula that are thoughtfully constructed according to disciplinary norms. But this potentially powerful system of protection is weakened when the faculty has little sense of how its curriculum fits…[Read more]

The story of the master’s degree in English and foreign languages since 1966 is most dramatically a story about women’s access to areas of study traditionally dominated by men and more generally a story about how economic shifts influence students’ degree decisions.

In some fields—notably, foreign languages—second majors make up an unusually large share of the students receiving degrees. If we compare the number of second majors in a field with the number of first majors, we see that second majors range from 3%–5% of the number of first majors in fields like communication and psychology to 10%–16% in economi…[Read more]

Critical credo: on the significance of openness in humanities scholarship.